Personal Safety Mobile App
For a two-week project during my UX Design fellowship at General Assembly, my team and I focused on extending Life Alert’s product to appeal to a younger population who wants a discreet answer for personal safety on the go.
Problem
Life Alert has a problem with its antiquated brand image that relies on a slogan from the 1980’s and whose current product serves an older demographic dependent on landline phones.
Solution
A mobile app that lets users connect to a trained dispatcher when they are feeling unsafe and lets them connect to 911 during an emergency. Users can share their location with a trusted circle of emergency contacts.
Meet Lucy
During our research, we synthesized the people we interviewed into the following archetypes:
- The worrier — someone who buys Life Alert for a loved one.
- The hero — someone who responds to dispatcher calls from a customer.
- The planner — someone who is hyper-prepared for emergency and disasters.
- The person of concern— someone who is worried about, sometimes excessively, by a family member.
Lucy became our primary persona. She is combination of the worrier, planner and person of concern archetypes.
Personal safety should not be a burden to loved ones.
Hypothesis 1 of 3
One of our early ideas was to implement a rear camera that would let Lucy connect with the Life Alert dispatcher or a trusted contact when feeling unsafe. The dispatcher could see what was happening behind the user and warn the person if someone was creeping up from behind.
What we learned
“That’s far-fetched. Someone has to be really paranoid, almost sick paranoid to want to watch a friend’s rear camera.” — Male, 30s
What we kept
Location-tracking
Personal safety can be shared by a circle of trusted family and friends
Hypothesis 2 of 3
Another early idea was inspired by the Swarm app that lets users see the locations of their friends and loved ones. The idea was to let this trusted circle of contacts see each other’s current state of safety at any given moment on a map. They could ask for help or offer help to others. A user would earn good karma for looking out for their friends.
What we learned
“I would feel safer talking to a dispatcher than a friend who might be too drunk to help me.” — Female, 20s
“If my parents could always see my whereabouts. They’d lock me up.” — Female, 20s
What we kept
Notifications to a trusted circle without 24/7 tracking
Lucy will feel safer if the app automatically trackers her in unsafe locations that she can specify
Hypothesis 3 of 3
We tested a solution that lets Lucy designate areas of concern by drawing a border around dangerous locations on a map. Life Alert would automatically track her when she walks into one of her pre-set zones.
What we heard
“Even places that seem like they’re safe could be dangerous. Only tracking in specific places wouldn’t be very helpful.” — Female, 30s
“If my parents could always see my whereabouts. They’d lock me up.” — Female, 20s
Takeaways
This feature needs more iterative design. Pulling in crime data might be a way to suggest safe routes to Lucy.
Lessons from usability testing
While my teammates focused on the high fidelity screens and project presentation, I made low-fidelity prototypes and tested them with users in our target demographic to help us determine the correct language for the app, to validate functionality decisions, and to have more in-depth conversations about what makes a person feel safe in dangerous situations.
