Safe Walks Home App
DATE: Sept 2013 - Jan 2014
AGENCY: DDB
CLIENT: Internal DDB project
TIME: 2 weeks spent over 2 months, including project meetings, wireframing, and prototype testing
STATUS: Unknown
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Whilst at DDB, I was brought into an agency initiated project. An internal DDB team had an idea for an app that would keep people safe on their walk home, an idea inspired by the tragic death of Jill Meagher who had been married to a DDB employee. This app would have prevented her death, or at least alerted Jills husband at the time of the attack and given her updated location had the app been in use. The app has a passive alert i.e. there is no panic activation required from the victim. This was a very important consideration in the design of the app and one that was deliberated over at length.
The initial idea was very complex and included ways that the walker could connect on social media with ‘watchers’ around them as they walked (to keep them safe) and ways to contact people locally if they felt threatened.
In summary I was tasked with drawing the flow of the experience which I did and I then re-thought and re-designed it and reduced it down to its MVP (Minimum viable product) which removed all social media and interaction with people not known to the walker. This was due to my knowledge of privacy laws and likely objections from the police authority about citizens becoming involved in potentially dangerous situations. Also, a victim cannot usually use a phone whilst being attacked and should not use one if they feel a situation is developing. Instead, the app detected if the walker became stationary or deviated from their pre-planned route, and asked for a de-activation code, and if the code was not entered, up to 3 emergency contacts were alerted with sms and phone-call with up-to date or last know location.
I then drew up the wireframes and worked with a programmer who created the prototype which was distributed to the teams mobiles. One problem we worked on together was how to know when the walker had stayed stationary for a period of time, what the period of time should be and how to work out if the walker had deviated more than a set distance from the route and what that distance should be. Our initial guesses proved to be almost perfect! Using some realistic scenarios I drew up, we walked around the surrounding area with a ‘walker’ and others in the team were selected via the app to be ‘buddies’ (Friends or family). The app was thoroughly tested – It worked really well!!
Note that this app would also be useful in other situations such as if a boat sank, the last known location would be saved to the server.
How would I improve on this? I would include functionality whereby trusted contacts could continually monitor the walkers location so that it could be used for parents to monitor children and backpackers to update family no matter where they might be in the world. This of course would need to be via an opt-in for the ‘walker’. The app also hides its purpose behind vague alert messages on the walkers phone as their journey progresses so that any ‘attacker’ would not know the app was active.
The next stage of the project was to be visual design, launch and then ‘seeding’ the app in the local community, which was to be the local university.
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