UC Berkeley is an active campus, with many students staying on campus until late hours to attend club meetings, study in the libraries, and attend events. This raises the issue of students safely getting home at night. The city itself has a reputation for high crime rates, and certain areas are not well-lighted and well-maintained, making the walk home feel even more dangerous. The university is aware of this issue and has provided night safety services, such as BearWalks, the night shuttle, and Door-to-Door shuttle, but these services aren’t always utilized for one reason or another.
When conducting user research, we focused on the question, “How might we help students get home safely?” We interviewed students who have all had to stay late on campus for various reasons, asking them questions such as how often they stay on campus late, how they usually get home, how safe they feel when going home, and if they use the school-provided services and why or why not. The overwhelming majority of students usually just walked home, often saying that waiting for the bus or a BearWalks walker took too long, or that they never felt particularly endangered when walking home late at night. If students did use the school services, it was usually the shuttle bus, and it was usually students who live farther away from the school or are more nervous about walking alone at night that use them. Interestingly enough, a small but substantial portion of our interview group had never heard of the school-provided services and seemed open to using them now that they knew these services existed.
The ideation process was similarly centered around the question of how to get students home safely. We generated many ideas, including new transport systems, better lighting, and more accurate scheduling apps, all based on the insights and suggestions we got from our research.
Early sketches
After generating ideas, I started narrowing down options by thinking about the user needs and eliminating solutions. For instance, I eliminated the idea of redeveloping a bus schedule app, because there are already many different iterations of that same concept. Upon further reflection, I realized that many students choose to walk home, regardless of the fact that there are already services available that can take students home safely, and much of that is due to issues with faulty schedules and long waiting times, issues that many of our generated solutions were just as vulnerable to. In realizing this, I decided to redirect my focus to a product that would make walking home safer, because if students are inevitably inclined to walk home anyway, it would be more beneficial to focus on making that safer than trying to create new systems with the same flaws that turned students away from the old ones.
Thus, I created the concept of homebound. The aim of homebound is to provide a central location for users to be able to quickly contact people if they’re endangered, as well as alert contacts once the user has arrived home safely or allow certain contacts to track their progress home. I started with sketches and a wireframe model of the various screens that I thought would be useful, then created mid-fi mockups of those screens in Photoshop.
When testing with users and receiving feedback, a common complaint was that the distress button was too easy to press, which could then lead to issues with false alarms. As such, I decided to include a safeguard in which the distress button had to be pressed three times in quick succession, and later included instructions explicitly stating that, because the motion may not be instinctive to new users. I also added toggle options for tracking and safe messages, because these are not features that are always needed or desired, and otherwise clog up the space with extra buttons.
All of this formed the pathway to the final design of homebound. The interface is meant to be simple and straightforward, with instinctive motions used whenever possible and clear instructions otherwise. Please explore the prototype and leave any feedback!
