One day, a relative of mine walked alone from their school to the train station. It was late afternoon, and it was nearly dark at that time. They sent me a message saying,
“Watch my location until I get to the train station.”
They sent me a live location and turned it off manually when they got into the train station safely.
Qualitative Research
Understanding preferences for group travel versus solo travel, Conducting semi-structured interviews, and exploring their feelings and behaviors in each scenario.
Research Area
To address the initial problem, I have formulated several questions which seek to identify the factors that contribute to the safety of travel.
Summary
I conducted four interviews with my relatives about their travel experiences, focusing on their feelings regarding safety and stress during their trips. From these conversations, three key themes emerged:
Access to information
Safety concerns
Use of gadgets and devices
Findings
Focusing on maintaining the information
Information is the main concern for users. In the old way, each user would just send messages one to the other to keep the information flowing, so I thought:
How might we introduce a new feature that helps users minimize their concerns by creating an automatic message?
Safety is the most important factor that needs to be considered
Users strongly prioritize a balance between knowing their loved ones are safe and staying connected with them, so I thought:
How might we create a feature that helps users maintain information and a sense of safety?
With the idea that we make, it’s good to give a storyboard to help illustrate the idea of the feature that helps the user.
Bringing the Storyboard to Wireflow
From the storyboard, we got the idea that We could put the new feature in the WhatsApp attachment.
After the user chooses the feature that we call here ‘arrival’ move to another page that shows the feature.
Map shown from current location to where to go
Users can customize the data shares if they want.
Exploring design option
The Receiver side needs various combination that makes the user feel engaged with the other.
Designinig the UI
Some changes from the wireframe and keeping with the Whatsapp design itself.
Sender, choose an arrival menu, fill out the data such as destination, data shares, and transportation.
Receiver will receive a chat message with the detail that they can see more about the location and based on the sender’s data sharing.
Asked my relative to try out the feature and see what she thought. Use a think aloud test so I can see what she thinks about the design.
The design itself is good. But when we send the arrival, the display it seems as if we don’t know from where to where.
It is great that we can customise the data, but we need more options like Last Online.
This feature will help people manage their worries about travelling.
Take your time to understand the user’s problem. It is okay to check and recheck.
This may be small and exploratory, given the technical and time constraints, but it’s got huge potential for how we live.
Take a step back if you need to, and look again at what we are trying to address.