As a part of our final course project for Interaction Design Practices, we created myBuddy App to help students stay safe around the campus premises.
User Research & Analysis,
Competitive Analysis & Ideation,
Low Fidelity Prototypes,
Visual Design,
Interactive Prototypes & User Testing
2 months (Fall 2019)
Class Project (3 Product Designers with shared roles)
Overview of the problem
Crime has increased across college campuses in the United States within the last five years. While crime has been decreasing nationally in the United States, it has seen an increase in urban areas such as Chicago.
What is myBuddy?
myBuddy App is a mobile application that promotes safety through a social/collaborative platform. Through this application, we help students add trustworthy friends to their trust-circle, request for an accompany or offer an accompany to a friend, and report suspicious incidents.
Features of MyBuddy App
The app allows students to create a trust circle where they can add new friends. Through this, they can request friends for accompany, or provide an accompany to them.
Students can add their destination address and send request for accompany to their trust circle. On the other side, friends nearby receive notifications to accept the accompany request.
Students can report a problem when they encounter a suspicious incident while traveling from one place to another. They can select the problem, add necessary comments, post the issue, and help their friends avoid that route.
The Challenge
Identify a major social problem and design a CSCW platform that could help and assist them whenever they face any problem.
The problem we selected: Crimes around campus
Why we selected this? We received a lot of crime-related emails from the campus crime department. Also, we had scary experiences multiple times while returning back to our apartment from the campus.
The Design Process
Secondary Research
Competitive Analysis of existing safety measures and technologies
Features uncovered from the competitive analysis
User Interview
We interviewed 10 students at Indiana University. Also, we asked about their engagement in using Safewalk and Rave Guardian App. Given below are some of the selected questions from the interview questions list.
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How safe do you feel around the campus?
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When and where do you feel safe?
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What route do you perceive as safe?
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How often do you use Safewalk?
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What do you think and how often do you use the rave guardian app?
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Would you be willing to accompany a friend, or walk home with a friend?
Defining the Target Audience
From a wide range of users, we narrowed our users to Indiana University students so that we could reach out to potential users easily during the short time period. Our primary focus was on female students but we also interviewed other students.
Key Issues identified from data analysis through Affinity Mapping
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Existing services lack off-campus service. The Safewalk program at IU do not provide 24 hour service.
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Overall crime rate has been rising in the last 5 years. Mostly, women are the victims of sexual assaults and they tend to be more scared.
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Most students expressed that they did not feel safe walking with a stranger from Safewalk.
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Most students feel unsafe when traveling alone at night.
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If students were to help each other, all of them were willing to help their friends in need.
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Most of the safety measures focus on providing help post an emergency situation.
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Students do not have any other choice but return back alone if there is no one to accompany them from the Safewalk.
Opportunities identified from the key issues
Redefining the Problem Statement:
How might we promote campus safety through a social / collaborative platform?
Brainstorming ideas to identify the feasibility
We brainstormed ideas individually and as a group which would address the problems that we identified from our primary and secondary research. We filtered all the ideas based on technological feasibility. After refining our ideas, we came up with two distinct solutions: a mobile application and a wearable device.
Key Requirements of the mobile app:
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Ability to create “Trust Circles” – letting users add people in their close groups to seek help when they feel unsafe.
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The mobile application is able to track the geo-location of a person on a real-time basis and share it to Trust Circles upon request.
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An instant message sharing mechanism – letting users share safety-related information to friends who live nearby.
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A reporting mechanism - letting users report suspicious or dangerous events occurring at a particular location.
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Technical Requirements: Smartphone, mobile application, GPS sensor (switched on), user signup, adding trust circles, sharing alerts responsibly.
Key Requirements of the wearable jacket:
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Wearable jacket safeguards the person when attacked by the assailant only upon activated before-hand.
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Upon sensing the external touch, the jacket sends an alert to mobile and to the trust circles only when synced up wirelessly with the mobile application.
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It should be a more convenient and approachable way to send the SOS alerts when the mobile phone is out of reach.
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The jacket should be designed to be worn in all climatic conditions and should be activated when the person is alone and deactivated as soon as the person reaches their destination.
Storyboarding
Once the brainstorming was completed, we shortlisted two systems, one with the mobile application for seeking help from trusted friends and another one, a wearable jacket where the person takes help only in an emergency situation.
Downselection and rationale for choosing the final idea
Based on the requirement of designing a social computing system, we decided to move ahead with the mobile application as our primary solution for a couple of reasons.
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Most users own personal mobile phones and are accustomed to using it.
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Users are familiar with social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This makes it easier for them to understand the idea of our solution, which is a collaborative platform, that requires individual participation to function effectively.
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Building a wearable jacket requires integrated mobile app. Moreover, students do not wear jackets during the summer in scorching heat.
Whiteboarding
Low-fidelity Screens & Initial user testing
With the help of features identified from brainstorming, we created the low fidelity designs using pen and paper.
Cognitive Walkthrough and think-aloud session helped us identify the usability issues
We found some key issues that needed to be addressed prior to working on the high-fidelity prototype:
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On the request screen, we have the same space dedicated for directions (map view) and request form (to send a request for an accompany) so that users just see one or the other.
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The ability of the requester, who sent a request for an accompany, to receive a confirmation that the escort request was accepted. Also, the requestor did not know how long they had to wait for an acceptance.
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The need to educate new users that adding multiple trust circles to various geolocations can be beneficial.
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The process of how a user, who uses the app, sends a request to someone who does not have the app installed.
Re-defining the flow & building sitemap
Visual Design
Visual Styles
Interactive High-fidelity Mockup
The core features of the app are summarized below:
User Onboarding:
Students can view the important features highlighted on the onboarding screens.
Add friends to trust circle
Students can easily add new friends to their trust circle.
Request an accompany
Users can add their destination address and send an accompany request whenever they feel scared in traveling alone.
Report problems
Users can report suspicious incidents, or suspicious person through the report feature. This gets pushed on the map view of the app. Other users will get notified about this problem. This way everyone can take a safer route while returning back.
The interactive mockups are embedded below. Please click on the screens to begin interacting.
User on-boarding
Login / Sign up Flow
Send an accompany request
Add new friends to your trust circle
Report a problem / suspicious incident
User Profile
Accepting an accompany request
User Testing using Maze and UX Expert Evaluation
I used Maze to test the app with 7 users. I asked the users to perform the three main tasks on the high-fidelity prototype. From this, I identified the success rate, bounce rate, and the average time spent by the users to perform the task. Further, I used the heatmap provided by Maze to identify the misclick rate that could help me improve the flow of the app. After each task, I asked a followup question to know their satisfaction level (from 1-5) and an open-ended question to know any issues they faced while interacting with the prototype.
Task 1 Results: Log in to the app and add friends to your trust circle.
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The customer satisfaction score for Task 1 was 60% with the remaining 40% being moderately satisfied. Some of the users were not used to interacting with a prototype.
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From the heatmap, we found that most of the misclicks occurred while selecting new friends. We can infer that users may have been confused because they were interacting with a prototype but not a real app.
Task 2 Results: Now that you have added your friends to your circle, try using the app to request an accompany.
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The customer satisfaction score for Task 2 was 80% with the remaining 20% being moderately satisfied.
Task 3 Results: Imagine that you see a suspicious person while returning back to your apartment. Use this app to report this issue and help your friends stay aware.
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The customer satisfaction score for Task 3 was 80% with the remaining 20% being moderately satisfied.
For the expert evaluation, we recruited four UX Professionals and two second year HCI graduate students to evaluate the myBuddy application. We asked each expert to perform 3 tasks: Request a Buddy, Report a suspicious person, Add a friend to Trust Circle. We identified the following:
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All the experts thought myBuddy was easy to use and rated the “look and feel” of the app in a positive way.
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Each expert cited ethical concerns when users are reporting problems. Every user will have their individual perception about another person and their safety. Race can play a major role in the way people judge each other as well as the homeless or panhandlers, or those who may have a mental illness. With that in mind our experts also raised concerns about false or fake reporting.
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Other feedback that we received spoke about including university officials and student association into the app. Also, the evaluators mentioned that people would use existing social media and communication applications, like Facebook and WhatsApp, for contacting their friends. From our research about existing apps and escorting programs, we found that there are a limited number of personnel for escorting for a limited amount of time. Facebook includes the feature of adding close friends, but the purpose of this feature is to notify users when their close friends are nearby. Our goal remains on creating a social group where users can send a “Request for a Buddy” to their close friends nearby without disrupting their privacy.
Here is the final presentation of the project:
Constraints
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Time was the most significant constraint for this project. If we had more time, we would have conducted UX Benchmarking to calculate the time on task and make iterations until users are happy and satisfied with the app.
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We also want to conduct a survey where we want to request the students to interact with this app and let us know if they prefer to have such a feature integrated in a social media app like facebook or whatsapp.
Future thoughts & how would we measure success if implemented?
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After an extended period of time, we would measure the daily active users (DAU). As we found from the interview that many students were not aware of the existing app, we would increase awareness about this app in order to prevent crimes.
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After an extended period of time, we would measure the crime rates around the campus.
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We would also ask timely open feedback from the users and interview few active users for further iterations.
Learnings
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I learnt that designs should be inclusive but it should not violate ethical values. Ethics play an important role in UX and Product Design. Privacy, ownership, confidentiality are some of the most important values that we should always keep in concern while creating a solution.
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Communication is the key to everything. With my punctual team-mates, I was able to meet, share, and discuss more. I realized that doing so helped us come up with more ideas but also discuss the drawbacks of each idea so that we could create a feasible solution.
