In recent years, our societies have been starting to pay more attention to women’s safety issues. Whereas, news and reports both show that countless women around the world still suffer from harassments or sexual assaults; if not, some may also have to live in fears or worries. Thus, I came up with this APP called Safe Alone that provide location sharing and some other SOS functions, hoping to help preventing and stopping another tragedy on women.
Brief
Duration: 2 months
Tools: Adobe XD, Illustrator, Keynote, XMind, UXpressia
Purpose
To design a tool for women to save themselves while encountering dangers alone.
Deliverables
UX Research/ Persona/ User Journey Map/ Functional Map/ Flowchart & UI Flow/ CIS Design/ UIUX Design
Background
Overwork culture and prevailing nightlife have changed the modern lifestyle; it is inevitably to stay outside after sunset. While the endless sexual criminal cases reflecting the potential crisis of public security at night, women might feel especially worried when being alone at night. Threats could be hidden in every dark alley that they walk into or every strangers that they pass through.
According to government’s official statistics in Taiwan, there are more than 7600 trailing harassment cases every year. And figures also reveals that there are hundreds of sexual harassments per year, and public harassment take the biggest part of them.
Therefore, as a feminist who concern about women’s safety, I wish to do something that could help women to feel and be safe in public.
UX Research
UX research was conducted to understand Taiwanese’ attitude and past experiences regarding to public sexual harassment, in order to know what is needed to help solving this issue.
Samples
During April of 2021, up to 170 valid questionnaires were successfully collected via internet. Cluster sampling method were used in this research.
The research aims at people who live in Taiwan, with 44% of Taipei-Keelung metropolitan (north Taiwan area) residents and 15–20% of residents from the 3 other smaller areas.
As for the gender, 79% of the respondents are female. Also, around 60% are those who in their early twenties that live with family.
Insights
About 2.7 in Every 10 People Had Experienced Public Sexual Harassment
1. Young, Alone, Dangerous
Approximately 2.7% of the respondents had been sexual harassed in public; and they were mostly under 26 (55% even under 20). Among these people, 75% were alone without any company when things happened. 77% of them didn’t know the harassers before.
2. Dangers Are on The Way Home
The results tell that on public transport and street are the commonest places for public sexual harassments to take place, respectively accounted for 33% and 31%.
Meanwhile, “taking public transport” and “walking” also turn out to be the Top 2 usual means of transport for most respondents.
3. Trailing Often Comes with Touching, and Mostly Happen on Streets or Alleys.
After comparing the types of harassments that people had encountered and the places that harassments took place, we did not only found out that touching is the commonest type of harassments, but the behavior also highly overlaps with those trailing cases.
With further investigation, the data also shows that there are 67% chances that these kind of harassments tend to take place together on streets or alleys.
4. Victims Have Troubles Distinguishing A Harassment and Resisting Strongly.
It is found that when encountering public sexual harassments, merely 15% of the victims were able to directly stop the harasser or defense themselves.
For most of them, passively shielding is usually the best that they could do at that moment since there’s too much concerns and risks to speak up.
Also, a certain portion of victims would hesitate on whether does the behaviors count as a harassment.
5. Emotions: Panic and Frightened
I collected victims’ reactions when harassments happened, and visualized the data into a word cloud. The most felt emotions were demonstrated with bigger fonts.
6. People Are Alerted to The Problem
The respondents were asked to self-rate frequencies of their related behaviors or attitudes on public harassment.
As the diagrams have shown, one’s frequency of being alone and the concerns about their own safety have positive correlation. And generally speaking, people express strong willingness to help out strangers that fall victims.
The worries and the thoughts of preventing these harassments indicate that people do have awareness of the issue.
Persona
As types of harassments and places that it happens may vary, I decided to create a persona and design for possible scenarios for this portrait. The details where set up according to previous user research and official statistics from the government. This persona portray a kind of female that may easily fall victim for harassments, and it was referred to every design decision made afterward.
Functional Map
According to user research, victims tend to adopt passive means to escape, and not to confront with the threat. Thus, to provide services that could actually be accepted by users, most functions are designed to create outer access for victims to help themselves getting out of troubles.
Flowchart
With blueprint of the main functions listed, I firstly tried to rank the priorities of all functions. Whereas, after reviewing TA’ emotion activities that surveyed in user research, I realized that since people tend to panic in such emergencies, the structure of the app should not be too complex, and all help-offering options should be highly accessible. Thus, as shown in the flowchart, all functions are positioned in the level of information architecture.
CIS Design
- LOGO:
The logo is inspired from the common shape of a landmark. I borrowed this mental model to convey the idea of “being safe anywhere”, and it also indicated the concept of “alone” by using one symbol only. - Font:
I choose Open Sans, a Google Font, as standard font of the app for being readable and modern. Also, its API could works reliably on both iOS and Android systems. - Colors: Orange is set to be the main visual tone because…
1. As an app designed for emergencies, the icon should stand out and be obvious enough for user to find the app in seconds.
2. Orange alerts often represent the near dangers, which happens to echo with what Safe Alone does: helping users to avert the in-coming crisis.
Not only did I look into the victims’ experiences, which were collected during user research, and plan out the expected user journey map that also referred to the persona, but I also got to discover some new ideas or opportunities in this process.
Sketches
I visualized my preliminary concept using sketches. The overall UI layout hasn’t changed much, but I adjusted the UI of Safety Check function for better consistency.
Mockup
Log-In Page
For the new user :
- CTA
Colors were used as a CTA. By highlighting some buttons with UI color, users would be more likely to follow the recommended procedure. - Logging In with Verification Code
There are two reasons why Verification Code stands out among all ways of logging in.
- First, it decreases user’s burden as it doesn’t require memorizing other information such as passwords.
- Second, verifying with cellphone is also to make sure that the signals is normal for cellphone.
On Boarding
- Goal
The goal of the on-boarding tutorial is to emphasize on the main functions of the app, therefore there should only be brief introduction rather than steps or details. - Graphical Instructions
After experiencing tutorials of several apps myself, I found out that it would be easier to learn if there’s real screenshots demonstrated in the instructions. Thus, all the instructions shows elements that actually appear in the APP only, assisting users getting familiar with the components.
Friends
- Goal
Having real-time location shared with trusted friends allow users to…
1.Easily know whom may be the nearest and most available to help when they need it
2.Have chances to notice if a friend appear in a suspicious place or abnormal route, avoiding potential dangers - Dismissible Information
By double-tapping the icon of a friend, secondary level of options and details would show up in a drawer; this kind of design could hide extra information when it’s unnecessary.
Safety Map
Safety Map is a concept inspired by Google Map, but designed for different usage; it’s a map that helps user to identify dangers and exchange information regarding to safeness of every corner in the city.
- Rate & Comments
As shown in the first and second screens, users can rate and comment on the safeness of a place, allowing visitors to be aware of the possible dangers. - My Pins
User could select to view “All Pins” or just filtered “My Pins” via the buttons on the top of the map. Adding favorite places to “My Pins” may help users to find what they need more efficiently. - Scrolling Area
As shown in the second screen, the card could extend to show more information, but not to the maximum. Because having a full-screen comment section would have be out of our thumb zone and affect the usability.
Safety Check
The Safety Check it’s basically an alarm for user to automatically or manually check-In; below are the steps:
- Set up an alarm of estimated arrival time and location
- Alarm would ring and pop up a notification if the user is not at the appointed location
- User could snooze or close the alarm, but if neither, the app should automatically notify the appointed friends
- Notified friends could send a canned reply to check in on the user
Tools
- Fake Video Call
This function is for users whom encounter a stalker or a harasser, but couldn’t find nor contact anyone. This could be necessary since according to the previous user research, 75% of the harassments happened when the victims being alone or without a witness. Thus, this function is to warn off the harasser by making he/she believe that there’s a witness. - Notify Friends
- Just like how it works for the safety check, the different is that user could contact the friends actively.
- Using canned messages could also help save time in emergent situations. - Phone Call
User could also make direct phone call in the app. - Alert Sound
The user research says that up to 40% of victims tend to stay quiet; some of them wanted but were unable to do so because of various reasons. Thus the app provide an alert sound function to deal with such situation.
Setting
- Dismissible navigation drawer
Dismissible navigation drawer was applied here to hide the setting that people seldom use, and to adapted to the limited space. User can tap on the hamburger or the other places to dismiss the drawer. - Mistake-Proofing Design
By putting hamburger far from the easily accessible thumb zone or making the log out button less obvious, it adds the requirements to perform these actions, preventing users from accidentally quitting the app.
Prototype
Here’s a video prototype demonstrating the functions and interactions of the Safe Alone APP. Or, you may also…
👉 Click to Check Out The Interactive Prototype 👈
User Testing
Future Improvements
- When viewing friends, users would have troubles finding secondary information of a certain friend since double-tapping gesture could be too subtle.
- When checking out friends’ location, it might be more direct if there are numbers indicating how many miles away he/she is.
- There is no way to edit or view the past comments on a location.
- There should be a searching bar to search for places in the map.
- Direct phone call to the police station could also be added.
Positive Feedbacks
- It’s smart if the app would automatically detect whether the users’ GPS location matches with where he/she set in the clock, and then only ring the alarm if not.
- Using canned message for communication is time-saving.
- The interface looks clean and comfortable.
- It’s positive energy to create a Mutual assistance network with this app.
Reflection
Since it’s only a concept that has not been published, and for the speciality of its using context, it’s not easy to evaluate how helpful it could be. However, I still learned a lots from making this project; while analyzing the user research results, I recognized that there’re still many improvements worth striking for.
