SafePath

12 Hours

A navigation app providing users with route options based a safety metric.

Impact

Created a high-fidelity prototype to provide small communities with safer route options.

Role

Prototyping
Logo Design
Academic Writing

Tools

Figma
Sketching
Adobe Illustrator

Teammates

Ivan Belikov
Nicholas Chun
Sharon Lin

Introduction

Driven by difference...

SafePath was created at the Women In Informatics (WINFO) Hackathon, hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle. Over the course of the 12 hour event, 8 hours were spent designing and implementing critique from judges.

Design Process

Background

In light of the #MeToo movement, the University of Chicago conducted a 2019 study on street harassment:

71% of women and 28% of men experienced street harassment
Women and people of color disproportionately experience harassment

Though these statistics were troubling, our team was inspired. We proposed a navigation app that would allow users to make more informed decisions about their travel routes.

Ideation

Each team member began by creating 1-2 hand-drawn, low-fidelity sketches of their assigned features of the prototype. I was tasked with the Alerts and Profile tabs.

Prototyping

After discussing and refining our sketches, we used Figma to quickly transform our sketches into high-fidelity wireframes. We collaborated on semantically connecting the pages to create a cohesive prototype.

Logo Design

I took on the task of designing a logo for our app. Drawing inspiration from the visual appearance of location pinpoints, and our emphasis on safety (S), below is the logo I designed using Adobe Illustrator:

Final Solution

We successfully created a navigation app prototype in 8 hours. Given more time, we would have liked to better operationalize our Safety Score calculations.

Takeaways

Learned how to collaborate efficiently and effectively in an interdisciplinary team of strangers (we met at the event, and each of us had different majors and interests)
It is important to know and be upfront about personal strengths so that tasks can be delegated within a team effectively
Learned how to be agile while going through the design process and produce quality results under a time constraint