Safety App for women — UX Case Study
A ride booking and live location tracking app for women travelling at night.
1 rape reported every 15 minutes in India, and 3,59,849 cases of crime were registered against women in 2017 alone. Cases categorized as crime were murder, rape, dowry death, acid attack, kidnapping, suicide abetment, cruelty against women, and kidnapping, etc. With an increasing rise in the number of crime statistics, fear of travelling at night is undeniably justified. What if a woman is stranded alone at a dark place, and a killer is just 10 inches away? With a question of asking “Does this happen often?”, even though the answer seems to be a straight NO, we must not expect it to happen.
Being a woman and having worried parents who are avid readers of horrific news happening everyday, I was curious to learn more about how women commute regularly at night time and find out the problems they faced.
DESIGN PROCESS
I used the 5 steps of design thinking process that would help me to empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test the entire concept.
EMPATHIZE
Before approaching my target audience, I decided to map a user journey of how I would commute at night to gather my evidence of what I observed throughout my journey and also made note of the pain points I felt during the journey.
USER JOURNEY
PAIN POINTS
- It has become impossible to travel at night without a phone
- Passersby gawking when walking or standing alone at night.
- When riding cabs, driver changes the route and that brings about a feeling of helplessness.
- Drivers accept money only but it’s hard to carry money all the time.
- When walking on road at night, the streets are generally dark with no lights and anxiety strikes at that very moment.
USER RESEARCH
To identify the core problem, I set out to find my target audience, who were women aged between 22 to 25 years and parents having children between 24 and 30 years. I met 6 women from different states in India and got an opportunity to talk to 2 parents from Chennai. I had 2 face to face interviews and 6 telephonic conversations where I recorded the call to gather and formulate my evidence.
Interview questions asked for Qualitative Research —
What mode of transport do you use for commuting and why do you prefer this mode?
What was your recent experience of travelling in the night like?
How often do you use online ride booking apps like Ola, Uber, and Rapido?
What do you do when you can’t find a ride at night?
What do you do when there is no charge in your phone?
What do you do when your driver seems suspicious?
How do you feel when the driver changes the route to reach the destination faster?
In case of emergencies what do you do if your emergency contacts are not reachable?
What do you do when you are at a dark, lonely place at night?
How does the driver feel when you use online mode of payment?
If you could bring some changes in the current system of women safety, what would you recommend?
Talking to these people helped me to gather a lot of information from both a parent’s perspective and a woman’s perspective.
DEFINE
To formulate the problem statement I transferred the interview recordings to data points. I created empathy map to separate the user goals and frustrations from the data gathered and personified each woman I interviewed to bring about the main heroes of the story.
EMPATHY MAPPING
USER PERSONAS
IDEATE
In this stage, I got a chance to have an Ideation workshop with my fellow design aspirants who were on the same journey of problem solving and got some pretty cool ideas on identifying a solution for each pain point and user goal.
Based on the creative and thoughtful ideas after conducting the workshop, User stories were created to give brief description of each feature for the app, that the user desired.
USER STORIES
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
User flow of the app is mentioned below.
PROTOTYPE
I made two revisions of paper prototype for my internal satisfaction! After getting the basic sketch of my paper prototype, Mid fidelity and High fidelity prototype was sketched digitally using Figma software.
PAPER PROTOTYPE
Paper prototype of the concept was sketched out after 2 iterations! Since I love sketching, I had the most fun doing this.
MID FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
UI and STYLEGUIDE
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
CONCLUSION
Design is an iterative process and I find myself adding features that would benefit the users. I learnt that no matter what solution we bring in digital devices, the real problem of women travelling safe at night would be solved when the solution is presented beyond the internet connectivity. Features like offline networking, crime statistics chart in every locality could help users be wary and self reliable to fight danger without being helpless. I would like to thank my mentor, Rambal sir who helped me get started in this concept and I look forward to improvising more and getting my hands dirty.
