My Way

Overview

Helping female students at Reading University to travel safer when alone at night.

Challenge

How can we make female students safer when travelling alone at night?

Many students across the UK have no choice but to travel alone in the unsafe areas and roads of Reading at night. There are a high number of reported and unreported crimes that make many students feel unsafe; especially female students. In 2019, between January and September, there were over 2,500 violent or sexual crimes reported to Police in Reading. Still, it is estimated that only 8% of these crimes actually get reported to the Police, so the real number is likely to be much higher.

Solution

Working together with an IoT company, Thingitude, and the University of Reading, we designed a solution which uses data to suggest the safest route for students to take, provides them with visibility of the real-time status of their surroundings, the location of their friends, live bus information and also gives them the ability to report incidents or concerns on a map to warn others travelling in the same direction.

This data is collected from sensors that have been installed on every street in the town centre and around the university; these will feed the app regular updates to ensure the information is recent and meaningful.

Empathise

In order to get to the right solution, it was important for us to first understand the people we were building our solution for and the real problems they face. I conducted user interviews with 6 female students to understand their behaviours, feelings and personal experiences with travelling around Reading.

These interviews enabled us to empathise with these women and their experiences; each of their stories made the problem very real and allowed us to think deeper about the challenges we were trying to solve.

We created personas (below) for the types of users we could see using our app, and kept them in mind throughout our process.

Define

Journey mapping

Together with the team, we mapped out the key insights from the interviews in the form of a journey map, capturing their actions, touchpoints, feelings and pain points, as well as the opportunities at each stage.

Ideate

How can we solve these challenges?

I facilitated a co-creation session with the students to do some brainstorming and ideation around the main themes that came out of the interviews. Co-designing with the students meant we were empowering them to make alongside and allowed us to directly ask ‘why’, and understand reasons behind their ideas.

We split users into the persona groups identified, ideated around ‘how might we’ prompts using crazy 8’s, storyboarded our ideas and shared and discussed with the users reasons for their ideas.

Below are the ‘how might we’ questions that we addressed in the ideation session:

Develop & trial

The designs and assets were handed off to the developers to build the app. In September 2020, we conducted a trial, diary study and follow-up interviews with the students from Reading University. This allowed us to understand better how our app would be used in real-life situations, over the course of 2 weeks.