The Challenge
Female-Identifying persons often fear for their personal safety when commuting, especially at night. Sometimes they opt out of taking public transport altogether at night - simply to feel safer.
Waze Transit
Designed a mobile app with an innovative solution to enhance personal safety while using public transit
The UX Solution
Our solution harnesses crowd-sourcing principles to optimize the users’ route for personal safety when they use Public Transit, including the walk to & from stations, which makes the users uncomfortable at night.
My UX Process
I believe that design is an iterative process and testing early & often offers the best outcomes.
DISCOVER: Understanding the Problem
PRoject purpose & User Research
One of our UX team members was harrassed on the street by a person who made her feel unsafe on her commute home. Our UX team decided to try & tackle this problem. After background research, we set forth to understand our users.
Who is our User?
Female- Identifying persons of all ages that use public transit & walking to commute to their destination in NYC.
Who is our Client?
We chose Waze as a potential partner in order to harness their crowd-sourcing data harnessing technology.
We believe that a gap exists in the market for safety apps and Waze could gain a first mover advantage by offering routes that optimize for safety. This could help generate goodwill & adoption for Waze in NYC.
DEFINE: Synthesizing trends from Research
User Research & Business Goals
Affinity Mapping is a classic UX technique that allows us to identify key trends from our User Data. We mapped out our findings from our user interviews to identify key trends.
User’s Primary Motivation:
Female-identifying persons often fear for their personal safety when traveling or commuting alone- especially at night. They feel that they should/could/would take extra safety precautions.Walking was considered the least safe at night, and public transport always involves some degree of walking.
Competitive Landscape for Safety Apps
Key trends& user insights:
Here are the Key Trends we identified & how they informed our design decisions for the Waze Transit App:
User persona:
We created a Persona to understand a typical Waze Transit User - their goals, needs, pain points & behavior to help us design a seamless experience for our users.
user’s journey map:
We also created a Journey Map for Amelia to understand her pain points when trying to get home safely after a night out in NYC using public transit.
Design: Turn Insights into a Product
Design Studio & Feature prioritization:
We sketched out possible solutions in Design Studio & decided upon important features for our final product.
Low-Fidelity & Hi-Fidelity prototype
After creating a paper prototype and testing it, we were able to create wireframes & final mock-ups.
Deliver: Testing & Delivery
