PROBLEM
Over the past 2 decades, the US has witnessed a dramatic surge in acts of violence and shootings at workplaces, social events, places of worship, educational institutes and more. With 1000s of casualties and fatalities, the public finds itself at risk every day, regardless of the setting.
SOLUTIONS
WHITE PAPER RESEARCH
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
After the information gathered by above research, I started studying which are my direct and indirect competitions in the market and what are they focused on. 3 of them are listed below. I noticed that these apps were either payment plan based which made them expensive for different user types or were providing alerts only from 911 and not other peers. Some of the apps were only focused on one type of user base like updating employees in a company. Some were a combination of too many features which led to the main focus of alerting others in dangerous situations a minor task. Such limitations then became my opportunity for the solution.
USER INTERVIEWS
For further research, I interviewed 5 students from the same campus, 4 employees from a company and a father of a family of 5 members. All these were victims of prior shooting incidents.
Few Interview Questions:
Tell me briefly about the incident you encountered?
What was your immediate reaction after witnessing the shooters at first?
If there is a mobile app for such situations in future, what should be the most critical feature of it? (As a parent, friend, colleague, teacher etc)
What was the most difficult part about experiencing it? Why?
What was the first thing that came to your mind when the attack occurred?
Did you have any app already installed that could alert the authorities of that attack?
Did you install any such app after the incident to protect your loved ones in the future?
After finishing the interviews, I organized my data for analysis.
The findings from the interviews revealed some interesting aspects which were helpful in further deciding the user flows for app. Fatherly concerns, Family concerns were a majorly helpful angle. I studied these findings to ideate on some possible solutions.
USER PERSONAS
Alisha | Age: 18
College Student
Interested in pursuing Psychology as a major
Loves to use digital apps and always remains busy updating her social media accounts
Daniel | Age: 31
Product Designer
Very hard-working and passionate about his job.
He recently got married and both husband and wife work in the same company.
ITERATIONS AND MODIFICATIONS
Students
Professionals
+
Family & Friends
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
After all the research I could clearly see that the app is not a very simple one. It has various layers and user types. No feature should be ignored as it deals with a critical issue. Main focus was to keep the process of alerting other users and authorities as quick as possible.
Making the above flow provided great amount of clarification and I began trying out sketches for various screens and multiple versions to visualize ideas quickly and analyze which would work best for users in a stressful situation with least number of clicks.
My focus at this stage was to get all the relevant details on the sketches, and improve in iterations later.
Here are some early sketches of the mobile application.
CONCLUSIONS
This project helped me understand a very important aspect. In some cases designs can be focused till the last extent but in an application handling a critical situation like ours, there is much more to be focused, people’s lives will be at risk so the most focus should be given to the UX, interactivity and performance of the application.
All design decisions must be backed up by solid reasoning,
Repetitive testing processes should be conducted to make it work best when an actual incident occurs.
Ping Me!