EDINA GARDOS
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Guard My Hood

Mobile app and responsive website design 
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Project Overview

​South 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 Role

UX designer. Responsible for user research, competition analysis, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, mockups, usability testing, iteration, high-fidelity prototype.
Picture

The Goal

The 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 Audience

​One 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
UX persona
UX design persona

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.
Wireframe sketch
Sketch wireframe

Wireframes

My digital wireframes reflected user research: 
  1.  Simple sign up screen with automatic GPS location data
  2. Large button for creating alerts and reports
Link to prototype

mobile app wireframe
Digital wireframe for mobile app
app wireframe
Mobile app screen wireframe

Usability study and some challenges

These were the main findings uncovered by the usability study: 
  1. Most users wanted to sign up via ZIP code
  2. Some users couldn't find a way to adjust the map on the Home screen
  3. Users were looking for an option to attach media to the alert form

Mockups

Link to prototype
Mobile app mockup design
App mockup
UX and UI design
UI design for mobile app

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.
Responsive website design mockup
“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.”

Conclusion 

One 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

  • Create a dedicated mobile app for Android phones and tablets
  • Conduct another round of usability studies
    to determine whether the current solution
    effectively addresses the users’ pain points.
  • Test the responsiveness of the website on Windows OS
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