Project Brief
Making Navigating the City Safer
For this assignment, we are given the mission to create and design a mobile application through Adobe XD that gives a human-centered response to emergency response. The app must provide some type of response to emergency services that help with non-life-threatening issues.
Proposal
In 2019, around 50% of women reported to YouGovAmerica about not feeling safe at night in major urban areas. Due to this, many women in urban areas have reported feeling unsafe doing basic tasks like riding the bus or even going for a jog. Another group that deals with a similar frustration out of those part of the LGBT+ community. In an article made by BBC in 2015, over 51% of trans people reported feeling unsafe using public transport. These specific groups need a way to feel safe doing basic tasks and ease their anxiety while also giving proper information to 911 for future incidents.
Many articles highlight how women/LGBT people can remain safe in urban areas. Still, I feel that creating an application that allows these groups to text a tip or keep some form of a video call on could help ease the anxiety of these situations. I also propose there could be an app that could lead you to several resources for these groups such as Safr and Hollaback, that give these groups the help they may need depending on the situation. For example, Hollaback is an app that allows women to report when they see suspicious behavior and have it reported to the local police in that area. These reports are usually non-life-threatening cases such as catcalling or street harassment. Something I did notice, however, was that many of these applications only pertain to women and that there aren’t many for the LGBT+ community. Many of these apps give police resources, and the lack of apps in this group could be law enforcement's negative perception of the community.
If I were to create an app like this, I propose that the app give alternative options to law enforcement and serve women and the LGBT community. Creating this will lower the amount of non-life-threatening calls made to 911, while also addressing concerns appropriately and giving the proper resources to handle the problem
Process & Research
Approach
One of the first approaches I took toward the project was doing an active amount of research into other applications with a similar premise. After separating the pros and cons of each of these I started looking into creating the visuals that would best pertain to the audience. I was able to create the initial assets in Illustrator and modify them further after receiving peer feedback. I then brought the designs into Adobe XD to start testing the prototyping aspect.
Research
When creating the visuals I tried to avoid some of the cons that the other applications had. Many of them had visuals that mostly pertained to women, but I wanted my audience to pertain more to women and those who were in the LGBTQ+ Community. I avoided making anything on the app that seemed distinctly gendered, as well as making it easy to navigate. The buttons are pretty self-explanatory and easily bring the user to the next screen while giving them a space to vent their frustrations with harassment and keep the area safer.
Competitive Audit
User Flowchart
Final Overview
In this project, most of my challenges came from struggling with fixing the smaller details in my prototype and creating new screens for each of the buttons. I also wanted to make my seem more polished so I had to go back and re-do every screen.
The biggest lesson I learned from this project was how to navigate Adobe XD and take the feedback from my class to create a more polished prototype. Before this class, I never used XD so it was a challenge how to use and do certain features in the program.
User Feedback