Safepath Mobile App

Team
Diana Fakhoury
Kalpitha Jagadeesh
Katherine Swei
Patricia G. Irazabal

Timeline
8 weeks
Oct - Dec 2022

Project Type
User-Centered Design graduate course project at the University of Washington

Tools
Figma
Miro

Project Overview

Amid a recent spike in incidents near the University of Washington (UW) campus and the resulting heightened student anxiety, we recognized an issue left unresolved on campuses. As students who have directly experienced this, we aim to use design to enhance safety for UW students, potentially creating solutions to empower them in dealing with safety concerns in their daily lives.

Solution

We created a mobile application that provides navigational assistance to students on campus and beyond. With Safepath, people within the UW community can navigate with confidence by viewing crime alerts on the map, find companions with similar commutes, notify loved ones about their whereabouts, and report incidents to inform others in the community.

Problem

At the start of the 2022-2023 school year, two unfortunate gun incidents occurred near the UW campus, resulting in one death and six injuries among UW students. The suspects were unidentified. As a school with over 40,000 students, campus safety is a concern, especially at night. Our problem focuses on the following design question –

Research

We started with secondary research to better understand the scale of the problem. This involved learning about UW’s safety offerings as well as delving deeper into crime statistics on campus and in the Seattle area. As a part of our primary research, we conducted qualitative research wherein we interviewed UW students and UW safety personnel to get deeper insights into the problem.

Research Questions

  • What is the perception of safety on and around campus?

  • Why do students feel unsafe?

  • What safety concerns do students have on and around campus?

  • What can help students feel safer?

  • What are some external variables that increase of decrease a sense of safety among students?

Synthesizing Findings

Once we completed all the interviews, we began synthesizing findings by transcribing the interviews and downloading our learnings as a team using an online white boarding tool – Miro. We did an Affinity Mapping exercise in order to find emerging patterns and themes in our data. We then did a second round of affinity mapping, focusing on our insights from research, to determine our main focus for the design solution.

Key Insights

Through our research, we discovered that students feel anxious navigating around campus, particularly when alone at night. This anxiety was especially present among people who were personally impacted by crime in the past. While students appreciated receiving UW safety alerts, they felt the alerts were too frequent and lacked context, which added to their anxiety.

Ideation

Ideation was my favorite part of the process. My ideation centered around creating a connection between fractured parts of the campus community: students, police, campus safety resources, and members of the public that impact safety in the area. Below are some of my sketches when ideating on this problem.

Narrowing down

After considering many wide-ranging ideas, we combined a few to create a holistic solution to this complex problem focused on the following goals:

Lo-fi prototypes

We began with a design sprint method known as Crazy 8’s in which each team member sketches out 8 quick ideas within a set time limit in order to maximize the ideas generated. We then combined the best aspects from each of the ideas to arrive at our main app flow.

Usability Testing & Iterations

With our mid-fidelity prototype, we conducted a round of usability testing with 4 participants to understand the following:

  • The user’s interaction with the home screen and whether it is intuitive to get around.

  • Can they figure out how to add a destination to start their navigation journey? Is the information that we have provided clear and useful to the user?

  • Is the Quick View providing useful information to the user?

  • Can the user find a companion easily and successfully?

  • Can the user find a companion for real-time navigation? Can the user schedule a companion for later?

  • Are the other flows that we are considering to design perceived as useful by users? Do they make sense to them?

We then made further iterations to our mid-fidelity prototype based on the feedback that we received during the usability testing sessions.

Change 1:

Use a grayscale map to make the homepage simple

The former version featured numerous icons that were found to be useless, so we switched to a grayscale map to focus on the most crucial information for our users.

Change 3:

Hide users’ info until they confirm pairing

Participants expressed that they would be skeptical to give access to receive calls and messages from people (even if it is a UW student) without any prior approval through pairing. Therefore, we decided to incorporate a layer of confirmation, before we enabled the ability to contact a buddy.

Change 4:

Provide more clarity about available buddies' routes

The old page didn't show other people's locations and how far they were, which increased the difficulty of choosing the right buddy.

Change 2:

Provide only clear and relevant information on the map

Participants felt overwhelmed by the numerous icons and pages because there was too much information.

Design System

After iterating on the prototypes, we revisited the information architecture to ensure a logical flow for the new changes we were incorporating. We then finalized a design system and proceeded with completing our final prototype.

Final Design

Navigate Safely

📍 Navigate Safely:

The main focus of our app is to help users navigate safely by providing variables that can assist them in their commute.

  • Incident alerts on the map

  • Nearby friends known as ‘Buddies’ to commute with

  • Bus and ride schedules based on destinations

  • In-app navigational assistance

Find Companions

Stay Connected

☎️ Stay Connected:

For an enhanced sense of safety, we incorporated a way for users to remain connected with their loved ones and provided them with the ability to send real-time updates about their current location so that they can feel safer during their commute. They can do so by adding emergency contacts and further sharing their live location and additional details about their journey.

Increase Awareness

👯 Find Companions:

This feature helps users find a Buddy to accompany them on their commute for an enhanced sense of safety. As our research findings revealed that most users felt significantly safer when they were with someone else as opposed to being alone, we decided to make it easier for users to find a companion to commute with based on their destination and mode of commute.

🚨 Increase Awareness:

This aspect of our app allows users to report concerning incidents that they encounter. This can increase communal awareness about unsafe occurrences and equip all users of the app with the ability to remain alert of their surroundings and choose their route to commute accordingly. These incidents will be displayed within the map once the incident has been verified by an authorizing body such as the UW safety services.

Future Roadmap

Final Showcase Video

Thanks!

Thank you to the many folks we surveyed, interviewed, and tested for this project. Thank you to Mania & Dawn for your feedback and support. And a big thank you to my teammates Kalpitha and Paty for presenting the final showcase while I was on the operating table!