A mobile app for pedestrians to feel physically safe to travel to their destination by reducing and avoiding crime. UGO focuses on building a safe experience for users with a buddy system, crime reports, and crime heat maps
Figma, Figjam, Google Docs, Zoom
Melissa Lin, Evan Quan, Danielle Wong
March 2022 (40 hours)
Design, Branding, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Research and Interviews
PROBLEM
SOLUTION
Based on market research, major urban populated cities are experiencing increased street violence and hate crimes, such as how NYC had a 343% increase of anti-Asian hate crimes.
DISCOVERING THE PROBLEM
Competitive Analysis
We benchmarked competitors (Stroll, Neighbors, and Citizen) to understand any gaps our competitors fail to address.
User Interviews
From interviewing 2 female and 1 male college students from California and New York that walk frequently in their neighborhoods, we discovered several things:
🔍 Key Insights
I created Jay Fei, a representative user persona, to better empathize with the user goals and characteristics we collected during our research.
We followed Jay’s journey as a user to put ourselves in his shoes for the entire process while noting where we could realistically improve his situation, we realized the emerging problem which is...
1️⃣ Unprepared for dangerous confrontations
Confrontations on the streets can escalate into dangerous situations unexpectedly, leaving victims feeling unprepared and vulnerable.
2️⃣ Lack of resources and fear of the night
Many individuals feel unsafe walking alone, particularly at night. Also, people often lack the tools and resources to protect themselves from harm.
3️⃣ Negative long term outcomes
Traumatic experiences can have long-lasting effects and individuals may lack resources to recover and heal.
Defining
We define the problem with How-Might-We (HMW) Questions and Product Goals to ideate a goal-oriented solution. Questions were generated based on the insights gathered from our research.
HOW MIGHT WE...?
• How might we make college students feel safer walking in their city?
• How might we connect student travelers together for a safer journey?
Feature Ideation
"Quantity over Quality"
Looking through the research we broke down what are the main features that can tackle all the user's needs. We quickly noted all of down on FigJam. We broke the features up into different categories: rating system, notifications/alerts, filtering, heat map software, companionship, and future updates.
User Flow
Before diving into low fidelity wireframes, we decided to map out the user flow or information architecture of UGO to allow us to have a checklist of all the user flow steps that we needed to cover. In the user flow, I worked on homepage, mapping route and route selecting flow, heat map, and statistic of incident page.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
We decided on creating features such as heat map screen, rating screen, route search page, onboarding, walking group page, and local crime statistics page.
Here are so many pages of the low fidelity porotype
Usability Testing
"Testing Early, Refining Early"
Due to the time constraint, only 2 users (1 male and 1 female college student) were available to test out the low fidelity app. I created an usability testing guide to ensure our interviews run smoothly.
FigJam was used to organize the collected data into fixable, positive, and not in scope/not relevant. From there, we narrowed down actionable to our current prototype.
ACTIONABLES
New Modifications
☑️ Change routing selection to be based on safety rating
☑️ Make a distinction between friends walking currently and open walking groups
☑️ Change friend invite icon
☑️ Enlarge heat button size
☑️ Swap filtered concerns for review summary
☑️ Fix language of filters and crime navigation
New Additions
☑️ Creating a better onboarding tutorial navigation
☑️ Close rating without reviewing their experience
☑️ Create a IOS popup for calling 911
We got a lot of great feedback from our users that we implemented into this iteration.
Example of completing an actionable
Design System
After interviewing, we created a style guideline consisting of colors and typography to guide the creation of the high-fidelity wireframe.
01 | NAVIGATE SAFELY TO YOUR DESTINATION
Travel on a statistically safer route!
Using the crime heat maps and navigation system that is based on route safety ratings, you can travel with ease with UGO. If you do encounter an unease situation, UGO provides quick access to emergency responders with just the press of a button.
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02 | WALK WITH FRIENDS
Share your routes with your peers!
Invite your friends to walk with you or join open walking groups! UGO plans ways to meet with friends on your route
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03 | STAYING ALERT AND CURRENT
Travel at ease from making more educated travel choices!
UGO locates high crime areas and alerts you of new local incident through out notification system of friends’ routes, live reports, and overall safety statistics of selected areas
In the future iterations of UGO, I want to focus on reducing 3 cognitive errors that I reflected on.
01 / Confirmation Bias
People look for evidence that confirms what they think
Due the lack of time, we really only got to research the statistics in crime in California and New York in more urban and populated areas. We didn't get a chance to take a more worldly view like in other countries and if these problems are prevalent there.
02 / Survivorship Bias
People neglect things that don't make it past a selection process
We only focused on the successful competitors never researched the competitors that didn't succeed and why they didn't succeed which makes our market research extremely biased not entirely well-rounded.
03 / Priming
Previous stimuli influence users' decision
Due to time constraint, some of the user interview participants were the same participants selected to interact with the low-fidelity prototype. These previous participants already are semi-aware of the objective of the prototype which can potentially influence user decisions during the usability testing.
