SafeHere

Brief

Working in teams, we had to create an interactive system that solves transportation and mobility issues within a city center. It had to be based on research, where we found an example of a system that suffers from a severe design issue that our team will help solve.

This project took around 13 weeks to complete starting at primary and secondary research, prototyping, testing, and weekly presentations to our class about our findings.

‍How Might We Statement

How can we help businesses and their employees report COVID-19 safety concerns to Safety Ambassadors on Main Street, Santa Monica? ‍

About SafeHere‍

SafeHere enables direct and discreet two-way communication between businesses and local safety ambassadors on Main Street, Santa Monica. Businesses recognize that visitors feel unsafe due to COVID-19 related issues.

SafeHere works with the city to ensure that residents and visitors follow COVID-19 safety protocols. Incident tracking and reporting are not only useful to businesses and visitors; it's also helpful to local law enforcement.

Through a smartphone app, business owners and their employees can capture essential information using video and pictures in real-time as incidents occur. Our highly trained safety ambassadors are here to respond to these reports as friendly first-responders. Their role is to educate the public and promote safe expectations while serving as a resource for the cities' policies.

SafeHere believes in addressing the qualities of life concerns with dignity, respect, and social responsibility. Our aim is to help those in need while minimizing negative perceptions of our city.

Research

Through our primary research we found that 65% of the people we interviewed felt unsafe while visiting Main Street, Santa Monica. While researching online we found that many cities have safety ambassador programs that help mitigate non emergency incidents. Safety ambassadors help lower police posts and in general keep the city safe, clean, and welcoming to visitors.

At first, we decided to implement a mobile application that would allow two-way communication between safety ambassadors and visitors along Main Street. However, after receiving feedback that this app could become a tattle-tailing platform we decided to change our target audience to business owners and their employees instead. Businesses have some form of accountability when creating incident reports for safety ambassadors which will help reduce discriminatory or false incident reports.

Prototyping

After creating a persona and scenario, we started planning out our app and determining the necessary screens we needed to design in order to showcase our concept. We used Adobe’s XD to wireframe and ultimately design our Hi-Fi prototype. The prototyping phase took about 5 weeks from wireframing, receiving feedback, creating a style guide, and designing the Hi-Fi prototype.

Testing

Once the Hi-Fi prototype was ready to be tested, we set up an account on UseBerry to test our prototype with others. We chose UseBerry because we wanted in-depth data results to understand how people were interacting with the prototype. Also, since we were all working remotely due to COVID-19, we wanted to be able to send out our prototype to people to test and for them to do it on their own without us watching them via Zoom.

‍Feedback‍

Some of the feedback we got from testing was that on the home screen there was too much going on and was confusing to users, the icons were not intuitive in what they meant, and after someone creates a report they wanted to be able to view how far the safety ambassadors is in a map view. We made the necessary design changes to our prototype and tested it some more.

Takeaways

We needed to show more quantifiable data in our research when presenting to the class and special guests. Presenting our concept to actual stakeholders such as the city of Santa Monica, business owners along Main Street, or Block by Block would have been beneficial to understand their needs better.

‍