a mobile application aimed at increasing pedestrian safety through alerts
Over the course of two semesters, I worked collaboratively with three developers in an agile environment to develop SafeSteps. SafeSteps is a tool created to remind pedestrians to stay alert and aware of their surroundings while navigating Boston University campus.
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TEAM
Jennifer Liu
Rithvik Doshi
Maxwell Higa
Kit Yan
TIMELINE
2023 (Sep~Dec)
2024 (Feb~May)
DISCIPLINES
Interaction Design
Visual Design
User Research
Prototyping
The Solution
SafeSteps helps distracted students and pedestrians who want to cross BU campus safely by providing discreet, location-based alerts as they approach high-density road intersections.
Research
Investigating reasons behind why pedestrians jaywalk or get distracted while crossing intersections
To identify opportunities of where we can help, our team focused on user job mapping, user interviews (20), and conducting competitive audits.
Insights
From our research, these were the notable insights I compiled of our users
☝️
Users like to press on the pedestrian button to feel like they are making the light turn green faster
🚨
Users are more focused of their surroundings when there is noise
🚔
People aren't as fazed by jaywalking or near accidents
📱
Pedestrians get distracted by their phones and do not notice signs signaling not to cross
🎧
Pedestrians may be listening to music and it prevents them from hearing oncoming traffic
⛑
There needs a bigger incentive than staying safe
The Design Goal
How might we remind users to stay alert and aware of their surroundings?
Ideation
To kickoff our brainstorming, we conducted three rounds of the crazy eights exercises (I can assure you, it was pretty crazy).
The goal here was to identify app functionalities that would address user pain points and bring focus to our MVP.
Creating the brand
While the application was aimed to alert pedestrians to beware of their surroundings, we didn’t want to alarm them suddenly, so we wanted to incorporate an app style that was discreet and not-so in your face
Even though our team favored option 1, we soon realized with usability testing that the alerts didn’t feel very alerting.
Browsing design systems, I took inspiration from Apple’s vibrant use of colors and tested the new colors with users. With A/B testing within the team/mentors/supervisors/earlvangelists 8/10 preferred the brighter color palette, confirming the need for the brighter color scheme.
Other Notable Design Explorations
How do we better streamline the onboarding?
Initially during onboarding, I created an initial survey for users to fill out so the app could tailor the app to the person, such as someone who frequently listens to music would have the auditory alert on. However, observing through usability testing, a lot of users felt it to be burdensome to fill out a survey in the beginning of the app, causing the possibility of users dropping the app.
A better incentive rather than safety?
Initially our application was focused on alerting pedestrians of any traffic-heavy intersections they were about to cross. However with additional user interviews and testing, we found that users were not very concerned about jaywalking being a safety hazard.
We experimented with adding other functionalities and landed on allowing users to add reports on BU campus that would be helpful for other nearby users to know.
A lot of our iterations involved figuring out how to easily allow users to file a report without being caught up in which category the report should be under.
A Few Takeaways
To be completely honest, when concluding this particular project it felt bittersweet. I had so much fun developing SafeSteps from start to finish with my team. While we were faced with many challenges, such as figuring the purpose of our application or trying to perfect the design when developing it, ultimately we battled everything together as a team which made the project fun and exciting.
Some more thoughts...
🧠 Seeing how developers and designers think differently
It was definitely a learning experience when developers gave me feedback. One on hand they trusted me and did not want to question my designs, but on the other hand they suggested iterations based on the feasibility of implementing functions. I realized that it was important to keep in mind what the user wanted and championed this idea by constantly asking for feedback from usability interviews
I know that in general I still have SO MUCH to learn, I'm excited to embark on new projects that allow me to better identify how to wireframe, conduct user interviews, and communicate with the team