🗒 Project Overview: TogetherAware is a mobile app that aims reduce the lack of confidence amongst women, in terms of their personal safety.
🛠 Tools Used: Axure, Figma, Miro, Trello and InVision
🔁 Development Lifecycle: Design Thinking Methodology
👥 Team Members: Individual (1)
There are 3 main reasons why there is a lack of confidence present amongst women in public environments, in terms of their safety, these include the following:
... And here's the research behind them
To gain a deeper understanding into the problem and the users concerns, needs, frustrations and wants for the problem, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 9 participants. Here are some of the most common responses condensed:
To synthesise the data gathered from the interviews, we analysed the themes and categories of the user interviews. We found three common themes, relating to different elements around the problem. This reflected the needs and wants of the users for this problem.
"Women’s Safety Apps" - How many times have you heard that? There has been an influx in women's safety apps as time goes on, so why is a lack of confidence in women present? We had to review the functionalities, aims and usability of our competitors to understand why this may be the case and how we could come to a usable solution.
Here's a functionality-focused competitor analysis.
What do our users not like about these apps? What can TogetherAware be to ensure your needs are met? Well, we did an interview to find out, take a look at what we found.
Meet Jay, TogetherAware's design persona. She was founded based on the two interviews that have been conducted and the data found from all the primary and secondary data gathered.
With our persona, the data gathered and the market scope – we identify how TogetherAware could be used? We made a storyboard based on Jay and how she may use TogetherAware to meet her needs and wants.
So, how did we do? We asked our users, by giving them 5 short tasks/goals to complete, we scored 61/95... not that great after all.
So given the information form the usability testing, we still need to work on the usability interims of functionality. But how about in terms of design? We conducted a heuristic evaluation (by Neilsen Norman) to find out.
Right, so with that, we iterated! We took onboard the findings from the usability testing and heuristic evaluation and created our second prototype...
To ensure that our usability has been built upon, we conducted a SUS questionnaire for the participants to complete based on the second prototype.
We conducted another usability cognitive walkthrough test, to ensure that the usability has improved since the previous iteration, making functionalities and tasks easier to complete.
Given the cognitive walkthrough usability tests clearly not matching our users mental model, we created a conceptual model which can ensure the following iteration matches.
So, we built on the information gathered form the two previous iterations and created what we now recognise as our final prototype.
To ensure that our final prototype’s functionalities are usable for users, we conducted a final usability cognitive walkthrough testing on our final prototype to ensure it meets the users expectations.
Based on that previous cognitive walkthrough, we created our users’ mental models and highlighted all the steps that align with our conceptual model in green and those that don't in orange.
We conducted two interviews; one before the participants viewed the prototype and one after they used the prototype; a pre and post interview. All they had to do was score their feelings from a scale from 1-5, 5 being not feeling confident at all and 1 feeling very confident. Here were the results from the questions we asked.
This reflects that TogetherAware is an effective solution for women having a lack of confidence in public, concerning their safety.
Based on that, we got a pretty good result. Butt, there are a few things I would change, to begin, I think I could've added in some Qualitative Data to see whether there are any anomalies or different patterns in a larger sample size, compared to the usually smaller sample size for quantitative data.
Overall, I do think this mobile application design was successful, personally, I could see it being adapted as possibly a community application too. As well as this, I hope to work on TogetherAware in the future to create an IOT design as I believe that is fitting for the problem given that most users are likely to feel more comfortable using a wearable and discrete device in a situation where they feel their confidence, concerning personal safety, is at risk
