According to the “Safety Perceptions Index 2023”,The feeling of safety in comparison to five years prior has risen by a good margin while people feeling more safe has had the opposite effect. This is not a good outcome considering that year by year our technological and general advancements should only help us feel more safe than ever.
To give a better idea about the growing concern of personal safety, it is important to note that the same index also has found that the “most worried” and “first hand experience” related issue of personal safety belongs to “Crimes” and “Unfortunate Occurrences” which also, isn’t the best the best indication of the perception of safety. Let’s dive in and do the ground work now.
By brainstorming and trying to understand what are the different ideas which can come under this broad umbrella of personal safety as a concept, I decided to first go ahead and collect any idea, concept or features which I thought resonated with this problem. Prior to this visualization, hours of reflection and brainstorming had happened to narrow the ideas down to the following:
For the ground zero research of this design case study I took the route of observational research and analysis, through multiple sittings of gaining information from available competitor apps and existing users on the web to understand the general state of such personal safety applications in 2024.Alongside this to strengthen my findings, I also took aid of genuine user reviews of a few competitors, existing user testimonies and the gripes of common users who wanted a better application for the use case.