Project overview
The app has been designed to be a guide and help students in the European Erasmus Mundus Scholarship Programme. It is a navigation app intended exclusively for women. The product focuses on quickly and intuitively showing dangerous spots and dark streets so that women feel more confident about moving around the city.
The initial problem was the app was developed to be an MVP, to quickly put a version of the Minimum Viable Product on the market, without extensive research on UX to assess the real needs of users. My role in this project was to implement user research to understand what users’ needs were and design a solution to the problem.
The entire process was based on Design Thinking, involving stages of research:
- Benchmarking
- Users survey
- Personas
- Empathy map
- User journey
- Screen flow
- Wireframes
- Prototypes
- Usability tests
Benchmarking
I explored other apps that offer similar solutions for monitoring streets and alerting the user to dangerous areas. The idea here is to understand how the competition solved the search for dangerous places and how they intuitively displayed information on streets that were dangerous and safe.
The following apps were analyzed:
The user’s problem
The user complains about not being able to use the app in the city of Trieste/IT and does not understand why it does not work there. The company’s support informs that they are present only in some metropolitan areas and Trieste is not one of them at the moment.
It happens that the app by default loads the map of the city of Turin and when the user informs the region she is in, there is no information on the screen that the city in question is not mapped.
User survey
After tabulating the survey data, I built 3 personas that represent users with their frustrations and specific needs when using the app to move around the city.
Personas
To easily understand the qualitative and quantitative data of the archetypes of the users (customers) who use the application, they were represented in the following personas.
In this report, it is possible to identify how they move around the city, what are their frustrations, what are their needs, and which brands they relate to.
User journey
The visual representation of the user journey serves to understand consumer behavior before, during, and after using the app.
Only after knowing each of these steps is it possible to recognize the flaws in the relationship with the customers and design better experiences for them.
Screen flow & Information architecture
It is a visual representation of the flow of screens, one can observe elements such as Buttons; forms; texts; links;
And the type of interaction that in this app is used only Tap and swipe.
Wireframes hi-fi
It is a technique that presents in High Fidelity (Hi-Fi) how the app interface will be from the aesthetically and navigation point.
It serves to validate ideas/hypotheses of screen flows that have arisen during customer and benchmarking research.
Prototype
Prototyping is a technique used to create and validate hypotheses (ideas) quickly and transform them into more efficient products.
To test the interface we put the user at the center of the process. Inviting her to the prototype tests and analyzing whether it interacts easily or not.
Conclusion
After testing with several users, the prototype was refined and delivered to the development team for production and subsequent publication of the new version.
