HER ALERT
Enhancing Women's Safety in Risky Situations
Role: Lead UX Designer
Team: 4 UX Designers
Duration: March 2024 – June 2024
Platform: Figma
The Challenge
Violence against women is a pervasive issue, and women often face danger when walking alone or traveling. While there are safety apps available right now, few work in times of high stress, as they either become too complicated or too slow to use. With this in mind, we chose to create HerAlert, a mobile app that would allow women to have an instant, rapid response tool they could use to feel safe and secure, especially in moments of panic.
Designing the Solution
We knew that the app had to be fast, simple. After conducting in-depth interviews and user surveys with women who frequently commuted alone or at night, we identified a major pain point: The current apps made it too hard to get help, fast. Thus, this insight became a basis for the design of our reduction mechanism of accessing emergency services friction.
To solve this, I took the team through the ideation phase, designing initial wireframes of a one tap emergency button as the main action of this feature. First we started quickly prototyping things and collected early feedback and refined our ideas through paper wireframes. In that, our objective with regards to it, was to make sure that all features are reachable in moments of criticality with few steps.
Innovative Features
We developed a community support forum as one of the stand out features that let users share advice and experiences. Foster and user empowerment aside, this enabled users to exchange useful precautions to be taken for personal safety.
The emergency resources section was another important design element as it provided guides to how to handle different types of emergency situations. Dynamic mix of safety tools & community interaction was intertwined into the final version of Heralert such that users felt supported after the immediate crisis.
Iterating on User Feedback
The process was guided by user feedback. While testing, we discovered that users wanted speed more than anything else but can at times be overwhelmed by seeing too many options on the emergency screen. My solution to this was to streamline the interface, lessening the amount of choices and streamlining the visual hierarchy. I also designed face scan technology for secure access, with the app unlocked quickly without compromising on privacy.
“While it’s great that you’re considering the safety of user data and reports, requiring a password on the home screen might hinder quick access in an emergency. ”
The Outcome
Both users and stakeholders received a positive perception of our final design. Praise for the app's simplicity and ease of access via one tap emergency – enough to cut time-to-action by 40%. "This app provides an elegant solution to a critical problem by marrying speed, security and ease of use in an elegant way," Professor Christina Chung, who oversaw the project, said.
In addition:
A 25% increase in user engagement occurred because women reported the interface as simple and reassuring.
Community features by integration were a tool to introduce a space for continuous support, and in turn a higher probability of a long term app usage.
What I Learned
The process of continuously iterating off of user feedback was further reinforced on HerAlert. I learned through this project to design for high emotion use cases like personal safety by not only just functional solutions but by empathy driven design. It showed the power of simplicity too, that the best tools are the ones that are out of the way when you need to use them the most.