BearSafe
BearSafe, a course team project on INF1602 Fundamentals of UX, is a women's safety mobile application in the mapping and navigation sector. This app goes beyond conventional navigation tools, integrating multiple safety features specifically designed to enhance the overall sense of security for women navigating Toronto.
Team Members
Chen Xu
Christina Piruchta,
Megan Eng,
Yang Li,
Yingying Zhu
Tools Used
Figma
Miro Board
Canva
How can women soothe the fear of commuting alone at night?
Project Background
Given that all members of our team are women, we frequently shared concerns about commuting alone at night in the city. Motivated by these experiences, our team collectively aimed to address the concern and raise women's awareness about the availability of safety resources. Our goal was to contribute to a safer environment and soothe the potential safety issues for women navigating the city, especially at night.
Throughout this project, I led the prototype design for the team and actively participated across multiple stages. I've experienced substantial growth, marked by key achievements highlighted below:
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Analyzed preliminary survey data. This has helped our team understand the target audience and our problem deeply through extensive research.
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Defined the persona (archetypal representation of prospective users derived from primary research). The creation of an exacted hypothetical persona of our potential user and the exploration of our potential users' pain points, desires, and needs helped our team to understand user needs, behaviours, and goals, ensuring the final product design is user-centred and tailored to meet the specific requirements of the target audience.
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Contributed ideas to satisfy user needs. I contributed innovative ideas to address user needs, which helped our team enhance the user experience by soothing the user's problems and needs.
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Participated in the prototype design process. I led the prototype design process, leveraging collaborative discussions and ideas to create a prototype aligned with project goals.
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Conducted usability evaluation. I contributed to the summative usability evaluation of our prototype. By asking participants to provide feedback on their experiences, our group can identify and address usability issues, further improving the design.
Now, let's walk through my journey, where this project explored an innovative way to help women be prepared, ensuring their journeys are not just safe but empowering and fear-free.
Understanding the Problem
First, our team conducted the secondary research and had the following findings:
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Women in Toronto face significant safety concerns, experiencing feelings of insecurity and instances of harassment and assault.
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There is insufficient awareness and education regarding the safety resources already present in the city.
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Due to safety concerns, women limit their movement within the city by restricting the times and routes they choose.
Then, through collaborative efforts, our team delved into extensive primary research, aiming to deeply investigate the safety concerns faced by women commuting in Toronto. Employing a dual-pronged approach, we conducted interviews, with each team member utilizing Google Docs to record insights, and implemented a survey through Google Forms. Our deliberate focus on women participants ensured a comprehensive understanding of their sentiments on the Toronto women's commuting safety issue, shedding light on their feelings and experiences.
Overall, our research has found, based on 47 eligible participants, that:
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Most participants felt anxious travelling at night.
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Most participants reported feeling safer travelling with friends or having someone talking to them in real-time.
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Many participants had strategies to increase feelings of safety, such as sharing locations with friends, avoiding distractions and monitoring their surroundings.
Survey Results
Survey Intro
Interview Results
Inteview Quesion
Analyzing the User
We then exacted keywords from participants’ answers and put each keyword into the Miro board to create an affinity diagram:
The diagram helped our team gain insights into potential user thoughts and behaviours.
Our discoveries led us to encounter Connie, our representative of key user type, who embodies a combination of common traits identified from research:
Imagine Connie, boarding a late-night subway after work, wishing for a safer journey home. Experiences like hers fueled our determination to create a solution tailored to her needs and alleviate her concerns.
Ideating the Solution
We identified a scenario which provides a comprehensive overview of Connie’s journey, outlining her actions, thoughts, and feelings.
After voting on pain points and identifying these challenges, I worked with the team to create the user needs statement around pain points, guiding our design focus.
Navigating Safety Concerns on the Night Commute
User Needs
This process illuminated two distinct perspectives on Connie's pain points:
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the need to feel safe (reflected in the left statements )
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the need to access safety resources (reflected in the right statements).
It ensures a design process centred around enhancing user safety and well-being.
Building empathy for users through a comprehensive understanding of their perspectives and needs, we engaged in brainstorming sessions to generate innovative ideas, with the ultimate goal of crafting user-centred solutions.
Subsequently, we organized similar ideas together, and each team member cast votes for individual ideas, considering their impact(can they address pain points) and feasibility(is it technically achievable). Utilizing the voting results, we compiled all ideas into a prioritization grid, guiding our team to pinpoint and concentrate on high-priority items.
Prioritization Grid
Our group acknowledged the significant impactful and feasible aspects of the design, which are:
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Real-time warnings
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Incidence detection
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Audio generation
Referencing the previous scenario, we formulated a connected and secure commute experience scenario incorporating ideas from the prioritization grid:
In this improved scenario:
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Connie leverages her phone for commute planning
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Connie can check for busy streets or areas with reported caution advisories, providing her with real-time information
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Connie’s phone offers companionship during her commute
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Connie has access to an emergency alarm if she deviates from her planned route.
The ideas empower Connie, ensuring she arrives home with confidence and a heightened sense of safety.
Product Vision
Our product vision revolves around positioning ourselves as a product dedicated to enhancing women's safety and well-being while commuting alone. This vision is reflected in our hills statement, which precisely defines our user, their needs, and the value we aim to provide:
With this foundation, our product focuses on three core tasks derived from the hills statement and prioritized ideas:
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Plan Route. Empowering users to identify the safest pathway in real-time by incorporating feedback from other users.
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Report Event. Enabling users to contribute valuable feedback on their routes, fostering a community-driven approach to ensure safety.
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Learning Hub. Establishing a vibrant repository of up-to-date resources, tips, and events, offering users a dynamic platform for exploration and engagement.
In essence, our product aspires to redefine the women's travel/commuting experience by prioritizing safety, user feedback, and safety resource learning through an innovative and user-centric approach.
Designing the Prototype(Lead)
To outline the specific steps that the product function should encompass before the actual design phase, we created draft task flows following the identification of core tasks:
I then conducted a sketching session with the team and sketched each task on paper:
We used the above low-fidelity paper prototype to test the usability and user experience, conducting a lean evaluation online via Zoom and Discord with two participants. Feedback was categorized into two aspects:
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Positive feedback: acknowledging the user-friendly interface
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New ideas: pinning events that are reported; leaving events option
Utilizing this feedback, I iterated on the paper prototype, leading the redesign of the mid-fidelity version:
Mid-fidelity Prototype
Home Page
Destination Input
Report Details
Learning Hub
Route Options
Events
Commute
Register
Report Choice
Comfirm
Building on the mid-fidelity prototype, I took the lead in designing the high-fidelity prototype for three main tasks in alignment with our product vision and design objectives. Our collective goal is to deliver a clean and inviting interface, particularly catering to women, evoking feelings of security, comfort, and trustworthiness.
High-fidelity Prototype(Function Display)
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Design Theme
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Purple: Purple, as the BearSafe theme colour, symbolizes trust and reliability.
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Teddy bear: Drawing inspiration from our childhood, we integrated into the present a concept that once provided comfort and protection. This decision allows a familiar element to continue offering a sense of security and safeguard in our current context.
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Plan Route
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Route suggestion: Provides recommended routes, prioritizing safety and reliability based on user feedback.
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Pinned report: We integrate feedback from lean evaluations and showcase pinned reports on the map, offering users insights into route conditions beforehand.
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Report Event
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Incident report tool: Use can give feedback on the route and report any potentially unsafe occurrences.
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Chat Function: Users can click on the teddy bear and select the "chat" button to communicate with other users when commuting alone, feeling accompanied.
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Call Function: Emergency button for help.
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Learning Hub
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Safey Resources: Provides valuable personal safety tips, articles, and details about upcoming safety resource events hosted by third-party organizations.
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Learning Opportunity: Users can easily register for events to gain insights into local safety initiatives, enhancing personal safety awareness.
High-fidelity Prototype(Interface)
Home Page
Destination Input
Report Details
Learning Hub
Route Options
Events
Commute
Register
Report Choice
Comfirm
Next Steps
We employed the DECIDE framework for our summative usability evaluation, aligning our evaluation goals with our hills:
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Evaluate participants' confidence in commuting.
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Assess participants' sense of empowerment.
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Examine participants' perception of community involvement.
Our aim is to determine if our design effectively elicits these positive feelings in users, so we generated four evaluation questions to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of our prototype:
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Do users feel a sense of community?
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Did users notice “Teddy”?
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Is the system difficult to navigate?
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Do users feel empowered using the app?
Our participants are ideal users for the prototype: females in their early 20s.
We gathered data through a mix of evaluation methods: observation and survey questionnaires.
The main findings include:
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User-friendly. Participants generally found the app design to be intuitive and friendly, with familiarity even when facing navigation challenges.
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Counter-intuitive icon. Participants expressed confusion with the "Teddy" icon's functionality.
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Report label confusion. Participants expressed confusion with the labelling of reports, including uncertainties about categorization.
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Handling of old information. Concerns were raised about how information posted weeks ago would be managed, including uncertainties about whether such information would be phased out.
To continually iterate on the project using the design thinking framework, particularly focusing on the activation journey, our primary goal is to enhance the prototype based on collected data. Testing on a larger group is deemed essential for more effective feedback. Additionally, exploring a different perspective, like evaluating male reactions to the prototype, is also under consideration.
Takeaways
Pivotal takeaways:
1. User-Centric Focus: Prioritize user needs throughout the design process, ensuring that every feature aligns with addressing genuine user pains and needs.
2. Empathy's Role: Recognize the importance of empathy in understanding user fears and concerns. Our shared experiences as women created a profound connection that significantly influenced the entire design process.
3. Continuous Iteration Vitality: Understand the necessity of continuous iteration, especially during the prototype design phase. Feedback from each stage informs subsequent iterations, leading to a refined and user-friendly end product. The addition of the pinned report feature, inspired by usability evaluation insights, exemplifies this iterative approach.
4. Strategic UI Attention: Strike a balance in UI emphasis. Early in the design journey, undue focus on UI details diverted attention from critical user tasks. Recognizing the importance of functional design over aesthetics, the focus shifted to ensuring optimal app functionality, with a user-intuitive interface naturally following suit.
Skill Developed:
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User research analysis ability
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Prototyping ability
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Design thinking ability
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Leadership ability
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Collaboration ability
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Problem-solving ability
Things Can Do Differently Next Time:
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Diversifying user testing to include a broader range of perspectives
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Initiating prototyping earlier in the design process
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Prioritizing clear and universally understood icon
BearSafe project have enriched my skill set and instilled a holistic and pragmatic approach to future projects. The experience has heightened a user-centric mindset, equipping me to navigate intricate design challenges with empathy and creativity.