Skydda

Skydda was developed in collaboration with UXMA GmbH & Co. KG as my Bachelor's thesis for my degree programme B.Sc. User Experience Design. UXMA is a development partner for user-centred and design-driven software and product development based in Kiel, Germany. While working on this thesis, UXMA supported with valuable feedback, largely assisted its progress and offered participants for interviews and user tests.

The objective of this project was to build a digital concept with a user friendly interaction model in order to communicate safety in public spaces ( = squares, parks, playgrounds, streets and publicly accessible interiors of railway stations, aministrative buildings and shopping centres).

I chose this topic because I myself have had the experience of feeling unsafe walking home alone at night, but also because needs for safety and security are listed in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. However, based on a survey with more than 45,000 participants, the feeling of unsafety in public has increased even though crime rates have decreased. This leads to people (both women and men) avoiding certain places out of fear.

The created concept should therefore have a positive impact, be an enrichment for public spaces and should give affected people a higher quality of life. To achieve this, I followed the double diamond process to ensure a user-centered approach:

In the discover phase, my goal was to open up the topic with research and knowledge gathering through the applied methods of literature research, expert interviews, and user interviews.

I analysed several books, articles and websites to gain fundamental knowledge of the topic of safety in public spaces. The literature research revealed that three main interest groups have an influence on the issue of safety in public spaces: The psychological aspect, police background and urban planning.

In order to get experts' specialised knowledge within their specific area on my topic, I first decided which areas were of interest to me. Based on my literature research, I wanted to get interview partners from the psychology field, the police field, and the urban planning field but also from other already existing services. I had therefore created four guiding questionnaires that differed slightly from each other with the software Condens.

The questionnaires were structured as follows:

1. Introduction
2. Consent for recording
3. Demographic questions
4. Key questions depending on the focus area
5. Summary and wrap up

I got in contact with experts and managed to conduct six interviews covering all four fields of interest, both online and in-person. To analyse them, I used the coding functionality of Condens.

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To get a deeper understanding of the strategies, wishes, needs and interests of the possible target group, user interviews should deliver valuable insights. Therefore, to find suitable candidates to interview, I firstly set up a small survey via Google forms. For measuring data, the person completing the survey could rate themselves on a six-point Likert scale ranking from never to very frequently.

The form was filled by 27 UXMA colleagues and let me find five suitable candidates that had at least occasionally experienced an unsafe feeling in public spaces. They all had different demographic backgrounds.

As with the expert interviews, I set up interview guidelines in Condens, conducted the interviews online, and analysed them through coding.

Analysing all the literature research, the expert interviews, and the user interviews let me draw important conclusions.

What triggers fear or insecurity in public spaces:

What methods are there for coping with fear and defending against threats in order to convey security?

Each individual can follow three methods:

• Avoiding going to sepcific spaces
• Being precautionary by e.g. finding friends that come along or carrying weapons
• Being bold by trying to be very self-confident

The environment can offer different strategies:

• Precautionary through police work or appealing urban planning
• Situational through high social visibility
• Other services such as the German service "Heimwegtelefon"

Appraoches when crime is happening:

• Precautionary by attending trainings for people at risk
• Staying alert to danger and your surroundings
• Select correct appraoch like running or getting help

The feeling of safety highly depends on gender (with women tending to feel more insecure), age (the youngest and oldest population groups are more affected), socioeconomic status (the more education and income an individual experienced the lower their fear of crime will be), and degree of urbanisation (the bigger the city, the bigger the fear).

Wishes and needs of the users:

• Better lighting
• Contact person or button when experiencing an emergency
• Knowledge about what is recommended to do in certain situations
• Access to safe spots
• Share one’s location
• Calling
• System generating loud sounds when in danger
• Helping to understand that other people have friendly intentions

Additionally, using existing services such as the "Heimwegtelefon" felt too drastic for users as that would mean they would have to admit their fear.

To analyse competitors' products, strengths and weaknesses and to derive best practices from them, it was needed to collect current, potential and non-industry potential competitors. I did so by making a table that analysed the basics, the products, and the assessing factors.

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In order to define the requirements, which should get included in the concept, I used the MoSCoW prioritisation technique. MoSCoW stands for Must Have, Should Have, Could Have and Won’t Have this time.

In my first iteration, I had settled the must requirements to:

• Some sort of light source
• Enhance social presence
• Be usable without depending on another person
• Cover actual security

These were iterated later after the first concept testing.

How exactly the communication between blokdots and ProtoPie works like, can be seen in the pairing example where the user has to press the Skydda button for two seconds in order to pair it.

For the onboarding and activating the system, a short video from the later conducted UX test also shows the interplay of app and arduino.

With the moodboard as the basis, I created a design system with component and style handling in Figma.

For the colours, as a primary colour, a saturated, vibrant tone between yellow and green was chosen. While yellow symbolises happiness and contributes to enhancing the vibrancy of surrounding colours, it can also encourage clear thinking which is of huge importance in a stressful situation. Green on the other hand makes one feel safe and is among the colour spectrum the most soothing one. Both features support what Skydda aims to convey.

To visualise an alarm, a red strawberry colour was selected. Red as a warm colour reminds one of heat, anger and energy and is therefore more aggressive and alive. Since it is already known as an alarm colour, it was ideal for creating a break in the colour style and hence get the user’s attention.

In general, it was supposed to be worked with a lot of white space to communicate a clear and straight forward look that is reduced to the essential.

The chosen font for all the headlines, titles, labels, and body text was Peridot PE Variable. With its slightly higher x-height, it has a very clear, straight forward and supportive appearance, while it also supports good readability. For numbers being displayed in the timer, the font DIN Condensed in typeface bold was getting used. It reminds of older alarm clocks and thus has a good connection to the timer display.

For the iconography, a confident and straight forward look wanted to be achieved. Therefore, the Material Design Iconset from Google was getting used, which offers a wide range of icons suitable for Skydda.

Based on these design decisions, I was able to create multiple components:

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The logo was a combination of a figurative and word mark, with the double D's forming the outer shell of the handheld device.

To fully utilise the possibilities of design, Figma is used entirely to build Skydda’s highfidelity prototype. With component handling, style maintenance and easy prototyping functions, Figma offers a good software to do so.

The created prototype assumes that the real Skydda device is not available to test its functionalities. Therefore, the prototype offers a simulation mode, which can let the person exploring the protoytpe experiencing its various functionalities.

Some examples of the prototype can be seen below. To test the prototype yourself, click on the button or screen images below.

As Skydda's limitations, the final high-fidelity prototype is not fully functional and its design could not be tested. Additionally, the way the system was designed could still lead to attackers manipulating it.

However, this bachelor thesis had the objective of building a digital concept with a user friendly interaction model in order to communicate safety in public spaces. Skydda therefore aims at heaving a positive impact, being an enrichment for public spaces, and most foremost, giving affected people a higher quality of life.

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my corporate collaboration partner UXMA GmbH & Co. KG for the work materials provided, the use of the office in Dresden and in particular to the employees of the company for their willingness to participate in various interview and testing rounds.

I would especially like to thank my colleagues from Dresden and Christian Jacobs for creating renderings as part of my final product. My biggest thanks goes to Ellen Geißler as my mentor, who has accompanied and shaped my work in countless consultations, has supported me mentally and encouraged me constantly.