Empowering Women with a New Product Design.
In today’s world, people who identify as women can never be too careful about their safety and security — women who go out alone in the public struggle with this general concern daily.
Our UX design team was presented with the challenge to explore this problem space and found it as the opportunity to design a new product solution that would help solve for women who feel unsafe and less secure.
Scope of the Project
Being able to identify with this problem space, we saw this as an opportunity to improve the experience of personal safety for people who identify as women who feel unsafe and less secure when alone. Our stakeholders have given us the green light to move forward in our design project.
We took fundamental steps to kick off designing our new product, using the double diamond UX framework in mind.
Discovery & Synthesis
In our project’s discovery phase, we wanted to explore and determine who are the target users we will be designing our product. We began with exploring our own assumptions about women’s safety to formulate our baseline for our screener survey and focused directly on asking questions about personal safety precautions and the use of different mobile safety apps. This survey questionnaire helped us weed out any possible subjects that did not align with our project. This process gave us what we needed to move forward to continue in our research efforts.
What kind of questions do I want to ask my potential users?
I needed valuable insight to establish who we are designing for and how I can best create a product that will solve their pain points, needs, and goals.
I conducted in-depth user interviews to find out as much as I could about my potential user. During the interview process, my participants had much to say about their experiences and worries. Not everything expressed during the interview was negative. Some women feel safe most of the time.
My team and I collectively gathered and identified our participants’ pain points and insights. We focused on highlighting key points that allowed us to build an affinity board to help us uncover and identify trends, themes, and “I” statements about the users’ experience.
Here is what we found about our potential users:
- Users are highly aware of their surrounding.
- Users are mindful of the possible dangers and take some sort of necessary precautions to feel safe.
- Users experience difficulty trusting strangers, however felt safe around other women.
- Users have had direct experiences or have heard from others about their experiences, which affect them today.
- The majority of users felt a sense of community in neighborhoods they were familiar with.
Now that we have better insight into who are target users are, we crafted a persona to be the spokesperson for all users and the main focus of our research during our ideation process.
Meet Samira
She is a 32-year-old young professional living in Seattle, Washington, for over a year now. Moving to Seattle has given her the opportunities she has always hoped for to advance in her professional career. As a grateful, kind, and considerate person, Samira has made friends easily living in a big city.
Samira’s problem and frustration are that she has been noticing a rise in local crimes, and it has been making her feel uneasy. Since she gets out of work late, she tends to find herself walking and using public transportation to get home more often, increasing her more uneasy feelings and lack of safety when she is alone. Grateful that nothing has happened to her so far, she has heard stories that have caused her to feel more anxious and make her rethink her current safety precautions.
“How might we help Samira feel safe and secure when out alone and feel confident within her community?”
Designing A Product that Solves the Problem
To better assist us in our ideation process, I decided to conduct a competitor matrix and feature prioritization to examine the current market. During my exploration, I wondered how we could take more significant steps to create new core features that other apps do not provide to our potential users.
The current market is currently split between immediate danger for women or feeling some form of distress for all consumers.
Taking our research insights and Samira’s frustrations into account, our team kicked off the design process by connecting the insights we found to help us design features that could help our potential users.
To recap key insights:
- Users are always aware of their surroundings.
- Users are mindful of possible danger and take some sort of necessary precautions to feel safe. Whether it is carry mace,
- Users have had and/or heard experiences before that affect their actions today.
This is what I needed to brainstorm our team’s product design.
We did three rounds of brainstorming sessions. We designed a women’s personal safety native mobile app, using the iPhone as a baseline for our product implementation into mid-fidelity wireframes.
We came up with a community-based women’s safety app design called Unity. It allows users to explore recent incidents in their current location, notify their emergency contact list, and create a safe space with other users in their proximity.
Here is a view of our wire flow with all the possible functions and pathways our app will provide:
Mid Fi Wireframes
With the wireframes ready to go, we created a clickable prototype to conduct usability testing on our product design.
Can users navigate our product design easily, intuitively, and quickly without any blockers? Are there any confusions in using this prototype design? Is it understandable and functional to use?
We asked four users to conduct a usability test, and this is what we found.
Our mid-fi design prototype had significant issues. Overall, we only have a 50% successful rate. One user failed two out of three tasks, and we only achieved a three stars rating average for usability ease.
Here are some takeaways from our usability testing result:
- Revise and simplify feature icons.
- Clarify user’s pathway and add indicators to give users confirmation and feedback.
- Add a screen explaining the features.
Hi Fi Prototype
We took the feedback from our user testing and implemented revisions to our hi-fidelity design to include the right amount of detail by structuring each element by relevance and importance. Our goal was to make sure we redesigned a more straightforward pathway for Samira to complete all three tasks to feeling safer and less secure.
Our final iteration of the product design now includes key visual elements, color, and typography. My team and I carefully chosen the design colors because we felt it was essential to offer our potential users a sense of safety and positivity. We paired together a color palette of blues and pinks to evoke unity, peace, and security.
Link to clickable Hi Fi prototype:
After creating our clickable hi fidelity prototype, I conducted another round of user testing to determine if our final design interations have successfully implemented a more user-friendly and functionally easy safety app.
Findings show our implementations from our first round of usability testing results have a higher success rate in finding and accessing our features from our product design. Users had an average time of one minute to complete all three tasks that we previously asked in our first usability testing.
This is good news!
Although users had a much easier time navigating our product design, there are a few more changes to implement to our design.
- Develop a way for the user to select all emergency contacts at once to send an immediate notification.
- Design explicit notification confirmation.
During our user testing, users expressed the importance of having an app to help them feel more safe and secure. One user suggested that our product design could be helpful for young adults, children, and older people.
Much work to be done, but I believe we are on the right path to designing a useful app for our users.
Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Women desire the need to feel safe and secure when going out alone.
From this, I learned the value and importance of creating a community-based women’s safety app that is functional, quick, and easy to use, making it accessible to women and all people.
Our next steps:
- Review & implement users’ recommendations from usability tests.
- Voice chat rooms sharing platform and to receive community-based support.
- Voice activation with trigger keywords (discreet way) to call your designated contact or 911.
- Press and hold panic button for possible immediate danger.
- Adding audio and live recording & backup system will record audio and automatically save it in the cloud in close danger situations.
- Implementing a search bar for users to search locations in advance.
My UX team and I have a lot to do to accomplish this goal. To do this, we will continue to review and refine the Unity mobile app by the end of June 2021.
As someone who can identify with similar experiences as Samira, my team and I are passionate about creating an app that we believe is valuable and will impact all users.
