nocturnal

1. Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Link
2. Describe your project (max 150 words) Nocturnal is a mobile application intended to increase night safety amongst college students by providing a platform for students to find groups of people to walk together at night. Students will also be able to choose to be part of certain affiliated group chats, such as female-identifying or LGBTQIA+. These are intended to promote comfortability and foster community. Within these group chats, you are able to customize “Group Walks” where you can set starting and ending locations with a group size of your choice. Students will also be able to create incident reports to any crimes that they witness, and will be given the option to create AI generated images of the culprit based on the description that they provide and send them to their local police department.
3. Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) Brainstorming issues undergraduates face, we concluded on three HMW statements regarding the topics of meals, safety, and transportation -- HMW utilize AI to make meal prep + planning easier among college students?, HMW increase student safety at night within college campuses?, HMW incorporate AI to quicken transportation for college students on campus? Upon further ideating our three statements, we focused on the HMW statement of improving college students’ night safety on/near campus, especially as UC Berkeley students who are consistently concerned with night safety. We first conducted research through Secondary Research and User Interviews. For our Secondary Research, witnessing UC Berkeley students post their personal experiences with dangerous and unsafe encounters on campus on Reddit (http://tinyurl.com/55tyx2hh), these anecdotes gave us more insight on the concerns of students throughout the years. Moreover, UC Berkeley’s Police Department posts’ alarming statistics and concerning details of their crime logs daily illustrate the need for students to feel safer in their community. We also conducted User Interviews among Berkeley students (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1WvQg441Y8sQgStzOS5ukbR57rFMOyoH-FnjZ18JhyRw/edit) to measure their safety, comfortability, and knowledge night safety and resources. Out of the 25 Berkeley students we surveyed, 14 women had the average feeling of safe night traveling at 1.9/5.0 while the 11 men had the average of 2.6/5.0. Furthermore, 92% of the respondents stated that they felt safer traveling with another person/group and 60% of the responders walked as their main form of transportation at night. Our team then moved onto synthesizing interview data and Reddit anecdotes through building User Personas, Affinity Mapping, and a 2x2 Matrix. Finding out that college students feel safer in groups, unaware of safety resources, and prefer walking than school transit, we aim to incorporate these aspects into Nocturnal. We created two User Personas – Yuna and Jeremiah. Yuna is a POC UC Berkeley junior transfer majoring in mechanical engineering living in Southside, Berkeley. She is female-identifying, 5’2, very introverted, creative, and organized. However, she realizes that she stays late on campus studying, making her feel unsafe walking back home. Since she is a transfer, she usually studies alone and is unaware of available safety resources, making her want a safer commute home while meeting other students. Jeremiah, on the other hand, is a POC UC Berkeley sophomore majoring in Media Studies living in Downtown Berkeley. Jeremiah is an extrovert, creative, and punctual. However, Jeremiah has class until 8PM and club meetings until 10PM, making him stay on campus late. Most of their friends also live in another part of Berkeley, making his methods of transportation timely and cost efficient. Therefore, they aim to find friends who also live on the same side of campus and commit to being on time. Utilizing a buddy system where college students can efficiently meet up, choose specific affiliated groups, and ensure safety with AI school affiliation detection, Nocturnal allows students to feel safer during late nights through socializing. By collecting data through several research methods, we narrowed down on how to develop efficient ideations to improve college students’ night transportation.
4. Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words) One important design decision that we included was integrating AI for verification of student identity through facial recognition and school login. Our survey data tells us majority of students feel safer moving in groups and had a preference of walking as their main form of transportation. Having all walk group members be verified through an institution and double-checked through facial recognition not only makes nocturnal trustworthy and reliable, but also gives an avenue for accountability/tracking if an incident were to occur amongst the students. This feature allows individuals to maintain the preferred method of walking for efficiency while providing an additional layer of safety. Our overall average feeling of night walking safety was 2.17/5 from survey respondents. Reading the personal anecdotes and police reports mentioned in Q3, this low feeling of night safety can likely be attributed to local past and recent crime. For this reason, we implemented an AI-image generation feature for incident reporting, which will allow the witness to create a police sketch based on a written description and describe how accurate or inaccurate the image is while their memory is fresh. This feature is an important part of nocturnal because it expedites the communication between the police and the witness, allowing the witness to send the information without needing to wait for reinforcements to arrive. Another important design decision was the focus on gathering for group safety. According to our 2x2 matrix measuring safety, efficiency, and reliability of the current UC Berkeley night safety resources, walking is the most efficient and reliable means of transportation–that is free–during the after dark hours. This is due to the unreliability or limited operational hours of the other means of transportation provided by the institution/city. Furthermore, 56% of responders stated that their reasoning for being on campus late is because of their classes, thus making the journey in the dark unavoidable. It is through this evaluation and the data demonstrating how students tend to feel safer traveling in groups that we decided to elevate and optimize the safety of walking by relying on social organization. Adding onto this, we incorporated ideas of "tags," labels students can select on nocturnal to be placed in additional chats with other students sharing the same background. Because there are marginalized communities that may be more vulnerable as targets at night, we wanted to consider and give them an option to feel comfortable and seek safety amongst those with shared experiences (ex: our survey data mentioned in Q3 demonstrates that women tend to feel less safe being outdoors at night than men; women may share more negative experiences at night and thus feel safer traveling with one another). In doing so, we aimed to promote community to help build trust, safety, and rapport amongst the students using nocturnal.

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