ISU - SAFE RIDE
Redesigning a Safe Ride Experience
Work
ISU - SAFE RIDE
Redesigned a safe ride app feature to enhance the
usability for students.
The Safe Ride feature in the Iowa State Safe app provides essential free rides for students between 6 PM and 5:30 AM, but usability challenges have limited its effectiveness. To address this, the research team is analyzing these issues and redesigning the UI to make the service more intuitive and accessible, ensuring students can easily use it when needed.
Info
Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
Team
Aditya (That’s Me!)
Harsh Sangani
Jiwon Kim
Tian Yao
Duration
6 Weeks
Mentor
Michael C. Dorneich
Problem
The current safe ride app has limitations that hinder its effectiveness in providing a reliable and secure transportation experience for students. Key issues include restricted service areas confined to campus boundaries, the absence of ride progress tracking, unreliable estimated arrival times during peak hours, and safety concerns arising from designated pick-up locations that require users to walk to potentially unsafe areas. These challenges reduce the app's usability, reliability, and ability to ensure a safe and convenient experience for its users.
Outcome
To redesign the Safe Ride feature's UI within the Iowa State Safe app to improve usability, ensuring that students can easily and reliably access the service for their safety.
PROJECT APPROACH
Over 6 weeks, We have led the end-to-end human-centered design process for redesigning the mobile app aimed to improve usability, ensuring that students can easily and reliably access the service for their safety.
My process focused on the new user onboarding journey and key tasks for experienced users, including home, profile, journal entries, insights, vision boards, and habits pages. This approach ensured a curated path to healthier habits and consistent self-development practices.
The project timeline included:
2 Weeks: User research, problem redefinition through affinity mapping, and strategizing solutions and key features.
2 Week: Mapping the user journey for new users and developing the app's information architecture.
5 Weeks: Delivering low and high-fidelity mockups and prototypes.
2 Weeks: User testing the prototype
3 Weeks: iterating on the six main pages and five task flows for the final deliverable
PROTOTYPE
I prototype key interactions of a robust app that not only meets users where they are in their journey but also guides them towards personal growth.
These 6 prototyped workflows were critical for testing interactions and ensuring the processes, such as creating a journal entry, were intuitive and not overwhelming. Presenting these prototypes to my peers during class allowed me to gather immediate feedback. Ultimately, the prototypes helped establish key tasks to test the experience with users, guiding me toward a more user-friendly design.
Challanges
PROBLEM SPACE
How might we help people achieve their goals while incorporating mindfulness practices to reduce mental stress and empower users on their path to personal growth?
Most often people who find themselves struggling with their mental health find it challenging to stay motivated and focused to achieve their goals or create better self-improvement practices due to the worries and pressure of their everyday life.
Often many make a plan to create habits or goals but often abandon them due to a lack of clarity they have in themselves or lacking a system for accountability. I wanted to explore ways to influence adults to develop healthier self-development habits.
User Research
How might we help people achieve their goals while incorporating mindfulness practices to reduce mental stress and empower users on their path to personal growth?
Most often people who find themselves struggling with their mental health find it challenging to stay motivated and focused to achieve their goals or create better self-improvement practices due to the worries and pressure of their everyday life.
Often many make a plan to create habits or goals but often abandon them due to a lack of clarity they have in themselves or lacking a system for accountability. I wanted to explore ways to influence adults to develop healthier self-development habits.
results & findings
USER TESTING
I led 6 virtual user testing sessions to validate the core features and gather insights into the app’s usability to then inform the iteration process.
I user tested the high-fidelity prototypes on Figma, showcasing Ember’s major functionalities and user workflows to participants that fit the 'lost' user archetype.
The prototypes that were tested included detailed interactions for key features such as the onboarding process, journaling and routine building and logging. Participants navigated through the app’s main functionalities and provided feedback on the interface, design clarity, and feature relevance.
Challanges
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