TESS
PERRY
Securus
An app that ensures the safety of its user by utilizing an analysis of the user's physical surroundings and community resources.
Securus is a device and application that in combination work to ensure the safety of its user by utilizing analysis of the user’s physical surroundings and community resources.
The device records movement information around the user to detect potential safety threats, if one is detected the application contacts local authorities for the user and offers them resources to local safe havens or transportation options.
ROLE
Product Developer
WHERE
Ann Arbor, MI
WHEN
Fall of 2019
TEAM
Claire Wenrick
Alison Ben-Levi
PROBLEM
There are a limited amount of safety features embedded into headphones for users to combat isolation and lack of awareness.
My team and I found an interesting design problem involving headphone use in public. With us all being college students, we noticed there were a lot of campus resources that give students rides late at night, but what about the student's that want to walk from the library to their house in the dark?
These students walking late at night are usually wearing headphones to provide themselves entertainment. Through the use of headphones, however, one's awareness of their surroundings is impaired and therefore can put this young adult in dangerous situations.
SOLUTION
Securus is a headphone attachment paired with an application that improves a user's awareness of their surroundings while listening to music.
The essential features of this device are:
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Detecting someone approaching the user and alert them, and potentially authorities
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Creating a headphone attachment to create awareness of a user's radius
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The attachment having the ability to stop the user's music, vibrate, and send a distressing signal
RESEARCH
My team began brainstorming solutions to this problem
by creating a competitive analysis.
My team created a competitive analysis that provided insight on not only what the market had or was missing, but also what problems we should be addressing in our design.
None of our upfront competitors had a feature for safety issue alerts. By seeing where our competition is missing the mark in the initial stages gives the affordance of making a more defined problem for us to solve.
IDEATION
Who is are our target users?
Personas
To figure out who our device would be targeting, I developed four personas of sample users for our design using Adobe XD. To make these personas as useful as possible, we maximized the diversity of characteristics amongst the personas by creating primary and secondary personas.
We then picked two personas, a primary and secondary one, and put together an interaction scenario that highlighted a set of goals/tasks that a user should be able to accomplish with our platform. The first persona below is our primary persona, with the following three being our secondary personas. Creating the personas was my favorite part of the design process because it made our product feel feasible and real!
Sketching
As a team we took all of our sketches and combined them to produce two storyboards that provided a visual narrative of our personas/scenarios.
User Flow Diagram
With our personas and scenarios competed, it was time to create a visual map of the various flows our users would take through our app. We considered the flow between different screens/panels and the different paths a user might take to come up with our user flow diagram.
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
After mapping out what interactions we wanted to occur on the app, we created a low fidelity wireframe of some of the interactions made in our user flow diagram using Figma for collative designing.
Paper Prototype & Usability Testing
In our paper prototype, we focused on tasks and interactions from the scenarios and storyboards we developed previously.
To see if our paper prototype was intuitive, we had a usability testing session where we could find defects.
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That's me!
After we had five participants interact with our paper prototype we found we needed to make adjustments in four main areas:
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A significant number of users were finding it difficult to differentiate between non-emergency and emergency. We decided the best solution would be to change "non-emergency" to report. This took away the confusion of not understanding what the initial terms signified.
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Another usability issue was the process of calling the Uber. This method was based on the process of elimination. Even though this was the case, it was not obvious to the users. The user did not really understand how to call an Uber in the app.
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Users were also having difficulty utilizing our hamburger menu to navigate back to the home page. To solve this, we created a consistent back arrow across all screens. This way, the user knows how to easily steer back to the main home page.
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Lastly, users were unable to recognize the change vibration setting within the app. To understand the preferences section more clearly, we added an information icon that users can click to learn more about that specific preference.
Using the feedback from our usability logs and testing, we were able to create a modified paper prototype with the implemented changes.
LOGO DESIGN
The next step was to decide on brand identity.
When designing the logo for Securus, we used the outline of a shield and an 'S' to create our logo.
HOW IT WORKS
Users can contact emergency services.
The main goal of this app is to be able to quickly contact emergency services if one is in a dangerous situation. With that being said, we wanted to make sure users could call 911 easily by having the button larger than the rest on the home page.
The app can notify your emergency contacts.
In the case, a user is in an emergency situation the app can notify their set emergency contacts via text. This text will inform the contact of the user's location and the ability to call 911 for them
Know the whereabouts of your contacts.
Within the app, there's a location services feature where you can see the location of your contacts, call a ride from your location, and view safety resources in the area.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
The final prototype I put together.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Empowering the user was the most rewarding.
Throughout the process, my teammates and I had open communication which allowed for creative dialog on how to tackle safety concerns when wearing headphones.
In this project I was particularly proud of my suggestion to design this app in dark mode. Considering the main purpose and use scenarios of this app, having the eye drawn to the screen of the user during an unsafe situation would be a large design flaw. The color palette, typography, and over all tone needs be discrete, along with elliciting privacy and trust to support the user while contacting authorities. Prior to this project I had never designed in dark mode, so that was an exciting new skill to developed.
While designing in a new color scape was exciting, conducting user research was my favorite part of this process. Defining our primary and secondary users made the product seem feasible in that a group of consumers could not only benefit from the product but feel empowered by Securus. Looking back on this project, I would have liked to spent more time researching features and finding a way to integrate data analytics in the archtecture of the app.
Overall, I'm very proud of how my team and I were able to incorporate the needs of safety, community, and communication into an interface that will help people feel safe and empowered to live their life as they choose.
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