Safespace

FEATURE 1

Personalize the voice

Set the voice of Sammy, an AI voice-bot to either female, non-binary, or male. The accent can be adjusted as well to create the most comfortable sharing space for you.

[data-wf-bgvideo-fallback-img] { display: none; } @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) { [data-wf-bgvideo-fallback-img] { position: absolute; z-index: -100; display: inline-block; height: 100%; width: 100%; object-fit: cover; } }

FEATURE 2

Share your thoughts

Engage in a conversation with Sammy, using your voice or your words. Share your thoughts in ways that are comfortable for you depending on your location, time, and mood.

FEATURE 3

Visualize your worries

Find a thought you want to get rid of, put it in the fire, and watch them disappear for visual catharsis. Ignite the fire, tilt your phone, watch your worry burn, and blow on the microphone to extinguish the fire!

CURRENT CONTEXT

What resources are currently available for college students?

Through desk research, surveys, interviews, and competitive analysis, we were able to categorize current available resources into two large categories: digital and non-digital. When we put all our findings together, we realized that there were common aspects students were looking for in the available resources.

METHODS USED

DESK
RESEARCH

ONLINE
SURVEYS

INTERVIEWS

COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS

...then why are they still struggling to find healthy outlets?

After understanding the available resources, we dived deeper into understanding what was missing in those resources, and where the frustrations were.

Lack of time & money

Students were reluctant to reach out to professional therapists because they didn't have enough resources such as time and money.

Need for instant relief

Most applications nudged users to constantly interact with them (like the journals we used to write in elementary). Users felt pressured and ended up not using them.

Emotional detachment

Students felt too emotionally detached from chatbot services with their robot-like voices. They did not feel comfortable, and were not able to fully open up.

IDEATION

Make the product easily accessible with low-risk for data privacy

Mobile application over web

Easily Accessible

One of the pain points was limited resources. Our users confessed to not having enough time or money to invest in professional therapy sessions. So we wanted to make use of the device they always carry around with, their mobile phones, making our product easily accessible right at their hand.
‍

Safe and private

Another concern was privacy. We were dealing with sensitive, personal information. Having an application, and saving the data only on the client side would ensure users of their privacy when using our app.

Ok then...

...what features do we need in our mobile application?

We brainstormed on what kind of features the product would need to achieve the design goals we have set. For better understanding, we quickly sketched the features that we wanted to get feedback on, and shared them with our prospective users to see if there were any misunderstandings on how we reflected their needs, and to validate our design solutions.

METHODS USED

SPEED
DATING

INTERVIEWS

After validating user’s needs, we iterated on our ideas and decided to focus on the following features:

Chat with an AI voice-bot

Visual catharsis for instant relief

Onboarding process for auditory settings

Why are we focusing on reflecting user’s identity to create comfortable auditory environment?

We first concentrated on trying to create emotional attachment through customizable characters. We thought this relationship between the character and the user will naturally create a comfortable space for users to share their thoughts.

However, our testing sessions told us a different story.

METHODS USED

ONLINE
SURVEYS

INTERVIEWS

We decided to take a step back and researched on what makes people feel comfortable. We realized that when users are in an environment they trust, or are surrounded by people they trust, they feel comfortable.

How do we show trust?

Being appreciated and acknowledged gave users a sense of trust for the product.

Then why don’t we give users the feeling of being represented? Being acknowledged of who they are.

We prioritized gender identity and regional accents because they could be seamlessly integrated into conversational interactions.

DESIGN & ITERATION

We had our features. We had some kind of an idea of how they can look like. But now our question was, “Are users interacting with our design as we intended? Is it delivering the effect that we hoped to deliver with our product?” So for some important interactions, we iterated multiple times through user testing.

Erasing: quick and easy

Through user research, we found out that users feel safer when they can easily erase data in an app. The act of erasing was related to their notion of privacy. So I explored different layouts to make erasing quick and easy.

Why this?

Users tend to erase chats from bottom to top (recent to old). Following user’s finger movement, by having the options in one column on the same side of the trash can, we can reduce the range of user’s movement.

NEXT STEPS

Expanding the range of senses

What I loved about this project was exploring how to create a comfortable and engaging auditory environment for users. We applied lessons from the physical world, like the importance of acknowledging others, to our digital app. I found our team discussions on this topic really exciting and inspiring. I believe that incorporating diverse technologies could take our app to the next level and create truly immersive experiences for our users. Some of these technologies are:

Sensors and haptics

For the visual catharsis tab, we could have users feel the heat, or allow them to blow on the mic/shake the phone to turn off the fire.

Virtual Reality

White noises, calm music were some common words mentioned when we asked users about comfortable audio. Providing visuals that support these sounds could add on to the experience users currently have.

We focused on the auditory environment, but there are so many other sense we could utilize to make users feel comfortable. I plan to explore these opportunities to further iterate on our design.