Cedric Ingram
UX Designer
Securus
Safety at your fingertips
(Sep 2019 - Dec 2019)
Problem Statement
There’s currently no application that empowers the user with proactive and reactive resources to secure their safety. There is also no safety app with a community aspect
Securus is an application and device pairing that in conjunction helps its users stay alert of their surroundings, and ensure their safety through crowdsourced reporting of suspicious activity
Target Audience
Tech-savvy adults 18-40
Components
Application: App that allows users to
Quickly reach emergency contacts/response
Report non-emergencies (car breaking down, pickpocketing etc.)
Find local safety and defense related activities
call for Uber/Lyft rides
pair attachment device
Device: Attachment to headphones that detects when there is nearby movement (i.e. moving cars, people walking by) and lowers volume of music to alert the user
Role: UX Designer
Team size: 5 people, including myself
Research
Deliverables
Persona - Emma
Persona - Joseph
Persona - Robbie
Design
Low-fidelity Wireframe
Our low-fidelity wireframe gave us a foundation of the user flow we wanted to have in Securus.
High-fidelity Prototype
After making our low-fidelity wireframes we began to iterate through our design use usability tests to help validate our features. After a few more iterations of this process, we made a mockup of our final interactive prototype!
Key Takeaways and Reflection
Narrowing the scope is important!
Our team ran into difficulty in the beginning because all had so many ideas for the app and the directions it could go. Creating the personas and scenarios for Securus helped us in narrowing features down to what’s important to our users and target audience.
Advocacy
In user experience design, the goal is to consider the user as not just a number, but as an individual, and the identities they share. As a Black person, I share an underrepresented identity in tech (according to a Wired survey, three of Silicon Valley’s top companies have less than 5% of Black employees on their roster). And this lack of representation can show up in the user experience. I find it is important that everyone, including myself, remains conscious of the diverse experiences a user may have, and gives pause to consider backgrounds other than their own. There were times throughout the project where I felt we were too narrow in our user perspective, and I presented this to the group and facilitated the discussion of how we could make our design more inclusive. The team was receptive and we were able to find solutions.
Need to know the right questions to ask!
Thinking of the right questions to ask for usability tests was difficult at times. What I realized was when tasks were hard to come up with, the features themselves weren’t as strong. So having strong features should will lay the foundation for having strong tasks. Also, keeping the task language ambiguous yielded us more nuanced results in our usability tests.
Ethics/Future Recommendations
The idea of having a safety app that also has a community aspect is something I think is valuable. However, if we had more time on the project I would’ve liked to reexamine some features, such as the map for reporting non-emergencies. Though the intentions are to provide a feeling of “neighborhood watch” to the users, the crowdsource element could have unethical implications. Since these reports would go to local police this could lead over-policing in areas with a high number of reports. This could also lead to police profiling. My suggestion would be to be more intentional with the non-emergencies we allow the user to report, or take the reporting aspect out of the app altogether, since many cities have other alternatives for reporting these situations.
Balancing Ideas
With five people in the group all having the same role, everyone had ideas and visions they were passionate about and wanted to see in the app. The way I navigated through this was keeping the focus on the stakeholders and taking into account everyone’s ideas and assessing how a compromise can be made.
A great learning experience!
I am glad I had the opportunity to hone my interaction design skills as well as work with my groupmates and learn from them!