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UCB BearWalk Booth
College student safety solved with design research
In this project, I worked with two other designers (Amy Gil and Miles Peterson) to identify an issue, conduct primary and secondary research, recruit test plan participants, extract insights, and design and test a solution idea.
Overview
Project:
Find and research an unmet user need and recommend a design solution to pursue
Tools:
Mural, Google Drive, Figma, ProCreate, Photoshop
Skills:
Secondary research, primary research, interviewing, concept testing, storyboarding, user testing, personas, journey maps, insight extraction
Course:
Design Research; Purvi Shah
Duration:
9 weeks; March 2021 - May 2021
Brainstorming
Double Diamond figure
This project took us through the double-diamond design process. The image above marks the key deliverables we produced throughout each stage.
My team started out by listing all the various issues we cared about and wanted to explore further in "How might we" statements. We voted on our favorites in Mural and explored a few ideas before committing to college student safety.
Skip to chosen idea's process.
Group HMW brainstorm 1; Mural
Group HMW brainstorm 2; Mural
Idea 1: Environmental Racism
The initial issue we wanted to tackle was environmental racism. We all agreed it was incredibly important and none of us knew too much about it so we thought it would be interesting to learn about. We did some secondary research, generated some ideas, and then tried to frame this topic as a design challenge.
Environmental racism links and sources; Mural
Environmental racism target audience; Mural
Environmental racism problems; Mural
Environmental racism solutions; Mural
Environmental racism Frame Your Design Challenge; Mural
Environmental racism design inspirations; Mural
To get a clearer idea of what our project could look like if we continued in this direction, we wrote up some screener questions for possible interviewees. The ideal participant we were looking for would have been someone who had experienced environmental racism or was at least knowledgeable about it.
Environmental racism screener survey; Google Docs
Idea 2: Light Therapy
The second topic we were interested in was the idea of light therapy as a means to combat seasonal depression. We repeated a similar process to the environmental racism breakdown in Mural shown below.
Light therapy links and sources; Mural
Light therapy target audience; Mural
Light therapy design inspirations; Mural
Light therapy problems; Mural
Light therapy solutions; Mural
Light therapy Frame Your Design Challenge; Mural
Just like in the previous topic, we wrote some screening questions for possible test participants. With this set of questions, we made it explicit to ourselves which answers we'd accept and which we'd reject. The ideal participant would have been someone who didn't get much sunlight because they don't go out much or simply lives someplace that doesn't get many hours of daylight. We were also exploring how the pandemic could have affected the amount of sunlight people get, so the idea of light therapy then shifted into mental health during quarantine.
Just like in the previous topic, we wrote some screening questions for possible test participants. With this set of questions, we made it explicit to ourselves which answers we'd accept and which we'd reject. The ideal participant would have been someone who didn't get much sunlight because they don't go out much or simply lives someplace that doesn't get many hours of daylight. We were also exploring how the pandemic could have affected the amount of sunlight people get, so the idea of light therapy then shifted into mental health during quarantine.
Light therapy screener survey; Google Docs
We put our screening survey in a Google Form and sent it out to recruit participants. None of us knew where the best place to find interviewees would be so we just put up posts in relevant Reddit groups.
Reddit recruitment post
Even though this wasn't the final idea we chose to move forward with, we got some interesting answers from the survey. Below is the data we collected:
Light therapy screener survey responses; Google Forms
In addition to the research extractions and screening survey, we drafted a research plan detailing the research objective, questions, a summary of background and secondary research, participant requirements, and discussion guide.
Light therapy research plan; Google Docs
Idea 3: College student safety
The final subject we explored was the issue of women's safety while out at night, and was ultimately the one we found participants to interview for and were able to progress with. The idea narrowed down to college students after our research and then specifically UC Berkeley student safety after moving even further along with the idea.
Before we settled on this though, we weighed the pros and cons of the other topics. We realized that the light therapy idea was heavily biased and problematic as it was starting with a solution without fully recognizing the problem. The purpose of the double diamond design research process was to solve for a problem, not to mold a "solution" to fit one, so we had to throw that out.
Environmental racism pros and cons; Mural
The biggest issue with environmental racism as our topic was that recruiting participants would be difficult. We took this class during the pandemic so the interviews would have to be conducted remotely, and the people most affected by environmental racism would probably be the least likely to even have access to the internet.
This was why we ultimately chose college student safety.
College student safety pros and cons; Mural
Brainstorming
How Might We help UC Berkeley students travel to and from campus safely?
HMW
Secondary Research
Through secondary research on women's safety while out at night and the insights we collected from it, we moved forward with the HMW statement above.
Mural Brainstorm
The image on the right is a compilation of the sources we looked at and shared with each other. We started broad and researched women's safety in general, street harassment, sexual assault on college campuses, and then finally specific details about UC Berkeley's approach to this issue. We chose UCB as the campus to target as it is close to CCA so we knew we'd find people to interview, and it is a large campus in what is colloquially considered a sketchy area.
College student safety problems; Mural
College student safety target audience; Mural
College student safety links and sources; Mural
College student safety solutions; Mural
College student safety design inspirations; Mural
College student safety Frame Your Design Challenge; Mural
Secondary Research Insights
We compiled the more relevant sources and wrote short summaries for them so we'd know where to go if we needed to reference something. These were some of the main insights we collected from our research:
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The perceived fear women have of possible sexual harassment/assault in public at night is much higher than the actual number of reported assaults within this context; regardless, the fear of violence controls women's use (or lack thereof) of public spaces
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The safety measures most colleges have in place are inefficient; a safety escort or shuttle demands students wait a period of time, leaving them exposed to danger
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Current precautions taken by students include mace/pepper spray, walking in groups, and self-defense courses
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The chance of being a victim of a violent crime in Berkeley is 1 in 171
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Berkeley's crimes per square mile is 750; California as a whole is 83; the U.S. national median is 28.3
Secondary research summaries; Google Docs
Secondary Research
Secondary research insights
Primary Research
Screener Survey
The next phase of this project was to conduct primary research, and to do that we had to recruit interviewees. To filter out the participants we didn't think we could interview, we wrote up some screener questions. The type of interviewee we were looking for was someone who could attest to the experiences of women on UC Berkeley's campus at night.
Screener questions survey; Google Docs
We put this screening survey in a Google Form and sent it out to recruit participants through social media and relevant subreddits.
The people who responded to the form and fit our criteria for ideal interviewee were those we ended up emailing for interviews.
Screener questions survey; Google Forms
Below is the data we collected:
Screener survey responses; Google Forms
Research Plan
After nailing down who we were looking for, we drafted a research plan detailing the research objective, questions, a summary of background and secondary research, participant requirements, and discussion guide.
Research Objectives
This first section of the research plan detailed the goals of our research, who we wanted to study, what topics we'd investigate, and why it's important.
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How might we help students feel safe when walking around campus at night?
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Those who feel unsafe when walking around campus at night
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Those who feel safe when walking around campus at night
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Students
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Males and females
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We want to find ways to improve the feeling of safety by listening to what our participants have to say
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What are the causes of feeling unsafe and what could we do to fix them?
Research Questions
We then listed out the main questions we'd look into with this study.
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Why do they feel unsafe?
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What does safety mean to them?
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What do they do to feel safe?
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What have they heard that happens?
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When they’re walking alone at night what comes to their mind?
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Are there certain parts of campus that feel less safe than others?
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Could they walk us through their day and when they get back home?
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What is UC Berkeley doing to combat these issues? Are they effective?
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If they do feel safe, why so?
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What does safety mean to them?
Background and Secondary Research
For the sake of being thorough, we added the summaries of our secondary research to the research plan. Find it up here.
Participants
Here we emphasized exactly the type of participant we'd interview. We decided we'd include male students and those who feel safe on campus at night to vary the perspectives.
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People who feel unsafe when walking around campus at night
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People who feel safe when walking around campus at night
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Students at UC Berkeley
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Males and females
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People between the ages of 18-25
Screening Questions
The research plan also detailed the screening questions we asked. Find those here.
Tasks and Activities
During the interviews, there was a timeline activity we wanted to include, so we added the materials we'd need for that in this section.
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Computer
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Internet
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Pen and paper
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Mural - Timeline exercise to plot feelings and actions when traveling
Discussion Guide
In the final part of the research plan, we wrote out a script to follow during the interviews, the specific questions, and the follow-ups we'd ask.
INTRODUCTION:
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Hello, how are you? My name is ___. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today! This interview shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
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We are students at CCA and would like to interview you about your experience of walking around campus at night. We are hoping to design a solution based off of this issue.
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All the information you provide will be strictly confidential, and your name will not appear on the questionnaire
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Your participation is voluntary. You may refuse to participate or may discontinue your participation at any time during the interview.
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There are no right or wrong answers, do not hesitate to communicate your honest comments throughout the interview, I am really interested in your opinion and thoughts.
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We are not testing you, we are here to learn
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Do you have any questions?
BODY:
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This will be more of a conversational interview, we want to learn about experiences from people like you to see what we can design to improve safety.
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What are some initial thoughts?
QUESTIONS:
General thoughts about UC Berkeley Campus:
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Do you like/dislike the campus?
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What do you like about it?
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What do you dislike about it?
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How do you feel about the surrounding area?
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How spaced out are the classes on campus?
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How long does it take to travel to campus from your residence?
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What is your main method of transportation while on campus?
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What does your schedule look like?
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Do you ever have to go to campus for evening or night classes?
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How often do you use the library?
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How long does the library stay open?
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Do you ever stay until the end of that period?
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Why or why not?
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What is the latest you would stay?
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Why?
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How often do you use other campus resources?
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What is the latest you would stay?
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Why?
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On those who feel unsafe:
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Why do you feel unsafe?
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Is there a difference between how safe you feel during the day and at night?
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What does safety mean to you?
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What do you do to feel safe?
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What have you heard that happens?
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When you’re walking alone at night what comes to your mind?
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Are there certain parts of camps that feel less safe than others?
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Could they walk us through your day and when you get back home?
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Do you know of any safety services that UC Berkeley provides?
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Are they efficient? Do you use them?
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Why or why not?
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What are some ways you would change these services to make them better?
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Why do you think people don’t use them?
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What services would you add?
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What would the appeal of these be?
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On those who feel safe:
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If you do feel safe, why so?
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What does safety mean to you?
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Could you walk us through your day and when you get back home?
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Do you know anyone who doesn’t feel safe?
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Why do they say they don’t feel that way?
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TIMELINE ACTIVITY:
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We would now like you to hop onto the Mural board link posted in the chat. Using the post-its and arrows, please create a timeline based on your emotions and feeling of security while walking on campus throughout a regular day.
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Please explain why you placed each event the way you did.
OUTRO:
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Do you have any questions or final thoughts to share? Thank you so much for your time and honesty! This has been extremely helpful. Have a good rest of your day!
Research plan; Google Docs
Primary Research
Interviews
Interviews
With the research plan complete and target audience located, it was time to conduct the interviews. We emailed the participants of the screener survey who agreed to a virtual interview and spoke to 5 of them.
Interview 1
The first interviewee was a woman who went to UC Berkeley who actually had a personal story about a violent encounter in Berkeley while out at night. We interviewed her over Zoom using the discussion guide. One person drove the conversation while the rest of us took notes on what she said that stood out.
Interviewee 1
Interviewee 1
Interview 1 Transcript
In our interviews, we asked participants to complete a timeline activity in which they walked us through an average day at UCB and rated their feeling of safety at each event.
Interviewee 1
Interview 1 Notes; ProCreate; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
Interview 1 Timeline Activity; Mural; Produced by Interviewee 1
After the interview, we deconstructed their answers to each question in Mural. From this we pulled out the insight that what makes being on campus at night feel more dangerous is the lack of other people around.
Interview 1 Deconstruction; Mural
Interview 2
The second interviewee was a male UCB student. We repeated the same process as shown above with all the other interviewees, with the exception of having this interviewee complete the timeline activity.
Interviewee 2
Interviewee 2
Interview 2 Transcript
Interviewee 2
Interview 2 Notes; Graphite; Produced by Amy Gil
From this interview, we learned about a male perspective in regards to the issue of safety while out at night in Berkeley. While most of what we found out was consistent with our prior research, this participant highlighted the normalization of strange encounters and how these situations felt more odd than endangering to him.
Interviewee 2
Interview 2 Notes; Google Doc; Produced by Miles Peterson
Interview 2 Deconstruction; Mural
Interview 3
The third interviewee was another male UCB student. Like the previous interviewee, he claimed to rarely feel unsafe at night, reinforcing that this was an issue that predominantly affected female students.
Interviewee 3
Interviewee 3
Interviewee 3
Interviewee 3
Interviewee 3
Interview 3 Transcript
Interview 3 Notes; ProCreate; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
Interviewee 3
Interviewee 3
Interview 3 Notes; Graphite; Produced by Amy Gil
Interview 3 Timeline Activity; Mural; Produced by Interviewee 3
In this interview, we learned which particular areas of Berkeley are more dangerous than others. People's Park and downtown were places this interviewee avoided.
Interview 3 Deconstruction; Mural
Interview 4
The fourth interviewee was a male UCB student who did feel overly vigilant and unsafe at night. He had heard lots of anecdotes and stories of scary things happening to friends of friends.
Interviewee 4
Interview 4 Notes; ProCreate; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
Interview 4 Transcript
Even though the two previous male interviewees claimed this wasn't much of an issue for them, we found out from this interviewee that the perceived fear can be just as high for both genders. We decided to expand our user base to UC Berkeley students of all genders based on this insight.
Interview 4 Timeline Activity; Mural; Produced by Interviewee 4
Interview 4 Deconstruction; Mural
Interviewee 5
Interview 5
The final interviewee was a female UCB student. She reported feeling unsafe at night and walking with friends in large groups to combat this. She felt there was strength in numbers.
Interviewee 5
Interviewee 5
Interviewee 5
Interviewee 5
Interviewee 5
Interviewee 5
Interview 5 Notes; ProCreate; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
From this interview, we learned that having people around is one of the best ways to feel safer while walking around Berkeley's campus at night. Additionally, BearWalk, the existing campus safety measure, isn't used very much.
Interview 5 Transcript
Interview 5 Timeline Activity; Mural; Produced by Interviewee 5
Interview 5 Deconstruction; Mural
Insights
With all the interviews concluded, it was time to figure out what our participants were really telling us. We studied each transcript and searched for common themes and patterns among the interviewees' answers to each question. Below are some of the insights we gathered from "nugget-mining":
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100% of interviewees felt safest with friends or other students around even if they didn't know them
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80% know about UC Berkeley's "BearWalk" night escort service but haven't used it or know how to request it, alluding to an inefficiency within the service's design
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2 out of 3 of the male interviewees said to have a higher safety advantage to this issue because of their gender
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80% said to avoid People's Park because of the many homeless encampments, instances of drug dealing, and crime
'Explore' Presentation
With all the research of this project completed, we presented our findings to the rest of our class. Below is a summary of what we had discovered at this point.
'Explore' Presentation
Building Empathy
The next phase of this project was to iterate solutions. With the research we'd conducted as a basis, we first created some diagrams and maps to build empathy with and better understand our target user.
Our team started with an empathy map. We thought about what our users would think and feel, see, hear, say and do, and what their pains and gains would be in the situation of being out on Berkeley's campus at night.
Maps and Diagrams
Empathy Map; Mural
We also created a user journey map detailing the events our target user might go through and their feelings at that point, and a second journey map depicting what our interviewees told us through the timeline activity.
General User Journey Map; Mural
Interviewee User Journey Map; Produced by Amy Gil
Finally, we created two personas to compare the attitudes and needs of female students to those of male students.
Female Persona; Mural
Male Persona; Mural
POV/Problem Statements
Based on the insights, personas, journey maps, and other findings from our exploratory research, we tried to individually create POV/Problem Statements and final 'How Might We' that would guide our design ideations moving forward.
Themes/Overarching Headlines
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Avoid certain parts of campus and Berkeley
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Walk with friends or in large groups of people
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The homeless people near campus can be scary
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Safety means going about your day without worries of being interrupted by someone with malicious intent
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Don't stay out after dark
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Be vigilant and aware of your surroundings
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More people = safer
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Walking on campus at night is inevitable
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People hear a lot of horror stories about things that happen
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A lot of people know someone who has experienced harassment at night
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Usually not a big deal, but still a daily issue
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Gender and size plays a role
POV Statement/Insight
Through the thorough deconstruction of what participants said, I drafted POV statements with this formula: user + need + interesting learning = POV
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A UCB student needs the existing safety services to be convenient for them to be motivated to use them, because currently no one knows anyone who does use them.
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A UCB student needs to be around other people to feel safe at night because one of the biggest unspoken fears is that if something happened to them, no one would know.
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A UCB student needs a way to travel to and from campus safely because many of the crimes they hear about happen off-campus and near housing.
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A UCB student needs the homeless people situated nearby to be relocated because being mugged/robbed/verbally harassed by them is a consistent fear.
HMW Generation; Mural
Building Empathy
Larger Categories
Among the themes, there were some overlaps in ideas, so I synthesized it down to three larger categories.
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Social presence plays a huge factor in feelings of safety
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Self-reliance and convenience trumps being 100% secure
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Light/visibility = more safe, even without people
Below are headlines for the themes, patterns, and connections we found.
Unexpected Learnings
There were definitely some surprising learnings illuminated.
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No one knows anyone else who uses the safety services UC Berkeley already has in place
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Students would rather feel unsafe and travel alone on campus at night than wait for an escort service
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The level of crime that takes place in Berkeley is proportional to students' fears about them
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The real issue is the poverty crisis causing homelessness
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One of the biggest fears is that if something happens to a student no one will know
HMW Statements
Finally, I drafted possible 'How Might We' statements to share with my teammates.
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How might we provide an inexpensive and convenient method for UCB students to travel to and from campus?
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How might we eliminate the animosity between the homeless people near campus and the UC Berkeley students who are afraid of them?
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How might we provide a general, human presence at UC Berkeley's campus at night so that even people who can't always travel with their friends feel safe too?
We all shared our ideas and generated new HMW statements based off of what each of us found to be the most important insight from the research. These new HMWs were driven by directions we wanted to go in with regards to concrete solutions.
Below is the final HMW we moved forward with:
How Might We provide an inexpensive and convenient method for UCB students to travel from campus safely?
HMW 2
Solutions
In this leg of the project, we generated multiple solution concepts to the key user problem we defined, evaluated them through concept testing research, and ultimately recommended a design solution we felt should be pursued.
Crazy 8 Activity
In class, we each partnered with someone who wasn't a part of our team to get a fresh pair of eyes and perspective on our topic. With our partners, we completed an exercise in which each of us took 10 minutes to draw out 8 sketches of possible solutions to the HMW and problem statement. Below are the Crazy 8 sketches my partner and I created:
Crazy 8 sketches; Sharpie; Produced by Vincent Chen
Crazy 8 sketches; Sharpie; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
Storyboards
After playing around with some ideas, we revised two that we could see progressing and created storyboards to communicate their intentions.
BearWalk app storyboard; ProCreate; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
BearWalk kiosk stand storyboard; ProCreate; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
Bay Wheels free bike rental after sunset storyboard; Graphite; Produced by Amy Gil
SOS safety app + alarm storyboard; Graphite; Produced by Amy Gil
Concept Testing
With our ideas visualized, we reached out to our interviewees once again, asking if we could test our concepts with them and get some feedback. Like with the initial interviews, we drafted a concept test discussion guide.
BACKGROUND:
Berkeley is one of the most dangerous cities in California and boasts one of the highest violent crime rates in America. UC Berkeley has a beautiful open campus, but many students feel unsafe in its surrounding areas, partly due to high incident reports they receive and the saturation of homeless people near campus. The students we interviewed reported their major fears being unwanted interruptions to their day and being mugged, as 100% of them could tell us a story of themselves or someone they knew who fell victim to one of those two things. The main solution we wanted to test was the BearWalk kiosk, in which student workers would be situated at different locations on campus and escort students who request a buddy when traveling home.
INTRODUCTION:
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Thank you for joining us again today! We’re going to go over some of the solution ideas we’ve come up with based on the answers you gave in the interview we did last time.
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Some of the insights we gathered from the interviews were the need for other people to be around to feel safe, a general reluctance to use the services UCB already has in place, and the most common fear being unwanted verbal interactions from strangers.
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We will present some of our solutions through the form of a storyboard so you can better understand the journey a user would go through.
QUESTIONS:
Go through the storyboard:
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Do you understand the solution depicted? Any questions?
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Do you think the problem we narrowed down to here is a relevant one?
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How important is this problem to you?
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How often do you encounter this problem?
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How effective do you think this solution is in solving the problem?
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Why or why not?
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Would you suggest changing anything to make it better?
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Do you think there are any drawbacks to this solution?
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Would you use this solution?
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Why or why not?
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Repeat above for other storyboards.
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Which of the solutions we showed you today do you think would be the most successful in solving this issue?
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Why or why not?
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Which of these solutions would you be the most likely to use?
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Could you please rank the order of these solutions from most effective to least?
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OUTRO:
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Do you have any questions or final thoughts to share? Thank you for your feedback throughout this entire process! It was valuable to get your insights and observations. Have a good rest of your day!
The BearWalk Kiosk and Lyft partnership app were the most popular ideas among the participants we spoke to. This was the average ranking of our ideas:
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BearWalk + Lyft
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BearWalk Kiosk
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Bay Wheels Bike Rental
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SOS Alarm + App
In addition, we learned that they liked the immediacy and social aspect, but thought it would be more effective to integrate the kiosk and app together. The only issue found was how the night escort would get back
safely after walking with students.
Solution Rankings; Google Spreadsheets
Concept test notes; Google Doc
We put our classmates through a bit of concept testing as well and received some more feedback on our four ideas:
BearWalk Booth Feedback; Mural
Bay Wheels Bike Rental Feedback; Mural
BearWalk + Lyft App Feedback; Mural
SOS Alarm + App Feedback; Mural
Final Idea
After receiving feedback, we created a storyboard for the combination of our top two ideas:
BearWalk Booth + Rides; ProCreate; Produced by Amy Gil and Amruta Bhavsar
In the app, users can see a map of BearWalk Booth locations around campus, as well as request free rides with Lyft after sunset.
BearWalk Booth map locations; Produced by Amy Gil
The booths would be positioned throughout campus, especially in remote areas. It would have a visible blue light coming through the top and 2-3 trained student escorts per booth. A group of people at each stand would bring in the human factor and sense of safety.
BearWalk App; Produced by Amy Gil
BearWalk Booth visualization; Produced by Amy Gil
BearWalk Booth mockup; Figma, Photoshop; Produced by Amruta Bhavsar
Solutions
'Iterate' Presentation
Below is the final presentation of our project. We still kept the research efforts the main focus, but included our solutions and concept test insights.
'Iterate' Presentation
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