Project OverviewSouth Africa has the 3rd highest crime rate in the world with burglary at residential property being the most committed crime.
The Guard My Hood mobile app empowers people to increase safety in their neighbourhood. Based on GPS location data, neighbours can share safety and security concerns without sharing their phone numbers and other personal details. |
My RoleUX designer. Responsible for user research, competition analysis, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, mockups, usability testing, iteration, high-fidelity prototype.
|
The GoalThe goal was to design a mobile app that lets users quickly share and receive safety alerts about urgent
concerns in their community without sharing their phone numbers and personal details. |
Target AudienceOne primary user group I identified through my research was young families who want to feel safe and secure in their Neighbourhood.
|
Persona
For this project, I created two personas based on user interviews and empathy maps
How might we - starting the design process
I did a quick ideation exercise to come up with possible design solutions for how to address the gaps identified in the competitive audit report. I mainly focused on the Home screen design including embedded Google Map, push notifications and alert messaging display. I also sketched out the initial wireframes by hand to encourage rapid iteration.
|
|
Wireframes
My digital wireframes reflected user research:
- Simple sign up screen with automatic GPS location data
- Large button for creating alerts and reports
|
|
|
|
Usability study and some challenges
These were the main findings uncovered by the usability study:
- Most users wanted to sign up via ZIP code
- Some users couldn't find a way to adjust the map on the Home screen
- Users were looking for an option to attach media to the alert form
Responsive website
With the app designs completed, I started work on designing the responsive website. The main goal for the website is to encourage users to download the mobile app and direct them to the App Store. Therefore I designed a simple one page website with Parallax scrolling navigation and I added highly visible CTA buttons to each section. To ensure a cohesive and consistent experience across devices, I designed and created mockups for MacBook Pro 16 laptop, iPad 12.9 tablet and iPhone 13 Pro Max devices.
“the Guard my hood app helps connect communities and prevents crime in my neighbourhood. It’s a useful tool and a good addition to our neighbourhood crime watch.”
ConclusionOne idea that this project drove home for me, was that conducting user research often and really paying attention to user feedback is vitally important in developing the main (most basic) features of the product when there is budgetary constraint or the product is in MVP phase.
|
Next steps
|