The Problem Women Face When Walk Home at Night
Our Team
Aaron Chen — UX Designer
James Chen — UX Designer
Trinity Cho — UX Designer
Project Inspiration
According to a research study conducted by YouGov RealTime in 2019, about 50% of women say they always or often feel unsafe walking home alone at night and about 60% stated they regularly take steps to avoid being sexually assaulted. Our team felt this needed to be addressed, especially with the direct impacts this problem has on some of our closest friends and classmates here at the University of Washington. This naturally paved the way to the problem that we wanted to address: finding a better solution to help women (specifically students at the University of Washington to begin with) feel safe and confident while walking home alone at night.
We are hoping to develop a solution that solves some of the larger pain points around this problem including, but not limited to: spatial awareness and surroundings, security and comfort of feeling accompanied by another individual, and finding the best route home. Through the design process, we are hoping to explore the question:
How might we help women at the University of Washington feel safer when walking alone at night?
Our Research Process
Once we decided upon the problem we wanted to tackle, it was time to conduct our research. This was mainly composed of a short survey that we could easily distribute, later leading to interviews of a subset of those submitted a response.
We chose surveys as our initial method for research for a couple different reasons. The first being the ability for us to easily distribute and receive responses from a large population, virtually, in the midst of COVID. The other reason being that the problem that we are trying to solve can be a sensitive topic for certain individuals. Sending out a survey gives participants the flexibility to decide what and how much they want to share at their own pace rather than being put on the spot if we were to approach people in person. Surveys gave us the ability to provide trigger warnings and safe spaces to potential participants especially as we ask them to be fairly vulnerable with us. Once we received our threshold amount of responses (20+), we went through the responses and interviewed those who responded as willingly in our survey.
The interviews were all one on one over Zoom and composed of women living off campus and currently studying at the University of Washington. Out of our survey responses, we conducted 5 interviews each about 30 minutes. Our participants and stakeholders that we interviewed mainly consisted of female students currently studying at the University of Washington between the ages of 19 to 22. This group directly fell within our target user group of who would be most impacted by our problem/solution and was also easily accessible to us as many of them are either our classmates or peers. Starting with this smaller, more specific group will help us with the start of our design and eventually we are hoping to expand it to meet the needs of all women down the line.
Using interviews as a follow-up to surveys was a fantastic opportunity for us to provide a safe space for our interviewees while diving deeper into their survey responses, backgrounds, and experiences. These two design research methods provided us with a great foundation of pain points and overarching themes relating to our problem statement which we can use to develop potential solutions moving forward.
What We Learned During Our Study
Survey Results
We collected survey responses from 40 women attending the University of Washington. Key insights from the survey were:
- When asked how comfortable they felt about walking alone at night, ½ of respondents indicated “uncomfortable” and 20% of respondents indicated “Very Uncomfortable”
- Nearly ½ of respondents had an unwanted interaction during their commute in the last year. Anonymous responses to our follow up question on unwanted interactions:
- “I always have to plan ahead when I walk alone at night… it’s like you get used to it at this point which is the problem”
- “Someone was following me, had to ask my friend to immediately let me into his apartment nearby.”
Interview Results
We conducted semi-formal interviews with 5 women attending the University of Washington over Zoom. The majority of them were upperclassmen.
After concluding our interviews, we coded our interview notes for key insights and affinity diagrammed them to group observations into common themes and user needs/pain points. Each post-it note’s color represents an interviewee.
Key Insights
- Some users feel safe walking alone because of their confidence in their ability to assess the danger of situations that may arise.
Compared to the other users, we spoke to someone who felt relatively comfortable walking alone because of her experiences growing up in urban areas. Consequently, this user felt confident in her ability to assess dangerous situations and trusted that she would be able to get out of most unwanted interactions that weren’t immediately threatening. Of course, our solution can’t control the experiences our users have, but this was an interesting insight on how users ’upbringings shaped their comfort with walking home alone at night.
- Users feel safer walking through well-lit areas
Well-lit areas help users increase their spatial awareness at night. However, many users shared that the residential areas that they must walk through on their way home lack public lighting.
- Users try their best to maximize their spatial awareness.
For example, frequently turning around to make sure no one is following them, not listening to music, paying attention to sudden movements, or facetiming someone with their back camera on.
- Users feel safer carrying a hand held weapon on them.
Nearly all of the users we interviewed carried pepper spray, but it was interesting because of those individuals, all of them were doubtful that they would be able to use it properly or defend themselves with it if it came down to it.
- Users find comfort in having trusted company (virtual or physical).
Many users shared that sometimes they ask a friend to physically walk them home or to stay on the phone with them so that someone has live updates on their safety and can just keep them company.
- Users strategize their routes home based on a variety of environmental reasons.
Many users shared that when walking alone at night, they will base their route on the reputation of an area (crime rates, word of mouth), how many people they expect to be in the area (some people prefer busier streets like University Ave by UW campus whereas some prefer the residential areas where there is a lower chance of running into anyone). Users prefer familiarity and have heightened anxiety when they are alone in a foreign area.
As we were grouping post-it notes, we noticed that many of the common groups represented ways that confidence was boosted in the user (and thus alleviated some anxiety) when walking at night alone. It is significant to note that sometimes these sources of confidence aren’t always a guarantee of better safety, for example, the users who carry around pepper spray but are unsure of how to use it. Thus, our goal going into ideation was to design a solution that increases confidence in the user psychologically, but also provides actionable ways for users to maximize their safety when they are alone.
Our Design Solution
From our research results, we chose two pertinent tasks to design for that our respondents prioritized the most from the interviews:
- Maximizing their awareness of surroundings walking alone at night
- Having a source of contact to interact with for a sense of comfort and safety
During multiple brainstorming sessions, our team explored a variety of design mediums, for example, a futuristic travel pod that could work alongside bike lanes in and around campuses, augmented-reality glasses with hand gesture interactions, and a smart watch application.
Ultimately, our team had to narrow down and focus on one solution. With factors considered like feasibility, practicality, and potential learning curve, our team decided to design a smartwatch to help female college students feel safer walking home alone at night.
Our smart watch application has three core features:
- Personal Assistant: codename “Betty”, the smart watch personal assistant plays an active role in keeping users up-to-date about situations developing around them, guiding them as they walk in unfamiliar areas, and alerting them when there’s potential danger or an unwanted individual following them.
- Motion-based sensor: a passive feature that tracks both movement in front of and behind the individual; this sensor will be vital in providing a second pair of eyes and will be able to catch things the user might not be able to when faced with poor visibility situations (a common complaint was the lack of effective lighting in areas).
- Smart Route Guidance: an optimized route finder that accounts for crime rates among passing neighborhoods and areas, average lighting levels, and population density trends. This route guidance feature will allow the user to prioritize certain properties for their paths (eg. population density, neighborhoods vs. city centers) and save their most popular paths with low incidence rates as default options.
The storyboard above depicts a typical scenario we found among our respondents: walking back alone to an off-campus apartment after a late night studying. Not only did the majority of respondents used to manually plan a route to get back home, but they often called friends for safety or looked behind them frequently as a precaution. With our smart watch solution, these students can confidently walk home knowing they have the safest route planned for them automatically, along with an assistant who will play an active role in making sure they can avoid any unwanted interactions along the way.
Closing Thoughts
While we focused on three features of our smart watch application, there is still tremendous potential for other offerings our application can have. For example, our design offers solutions that are purely preventative — but what if one of our users is faced with an unpreventable situation? How can we help them in the midst of an unwanted interaction, instead of before one? Some avenues for exploration could involve a heart rate sensor that can trigger emergency calls when the user is in immediate danger or a built-in pepper spray mechanism in the watch itself.
Ultimately, there is still a lot of room to innovate in this space. And this problem is increasingly relevant to the many female college students who are constantly concerned for their safety during their commute. As a team, we hope to see more design solutions approaching this problem area and creating better and safer experiences for everyone.
