LitTrail

Demo shots of our prototype. Please do try it using our Figma link!
Behind-The-Scenes of our Figma board

By Team B;-)))))) 🦥🍛, consisting of Ashley Teoh and Nicole Choong

View our Figma Board here: link

Inspiration

Studying abroad during my first year of independence as a university student opened my eyes to how dangerous it could be to simply walk back home - a commute required by everyone. Particularly, the story of Sarah Everard left a big impact on me, as it did for many women and non-binaries across the globe.

Ordinary methods of prevention - the bright clothes, trainers, keys between your knuckles - aren’t enough. LitTrail aims to make street safety a community effort by populating streets with more pedestrians through redirecting more individuals to share a common path on their way home.

Our gamified solution was inspired by Pokemon Go! Living through the age where an app could quite literally dictate where you walked and visited for no tangible reason, we decided that a similar approach could be utilised to encourage safety through numbers.

What it does

LitTrail has three key features.

Indicating well-lit paths for users to take on their commute home. Many pre-existing apps focus on the shortest route, suggesting shady alleys and dark corners, so we wanted to distinguish our system by prioritising safe over short.
Allowing users to add friends and notify them when they are walking alone. This feature also enables friends to track their location and monitor their trip remotely. In the case of unease or an emergency, we had a two-step SOS system to blast notify all your friends at the hold of a button and further call the police if needed.
Rerouting pedestrians to common paths. LitTrail is a strong believer of safety in numbers, hence our gamified approach to reducing street crime. ‘Fireballs’, our virtual currency, have been placed to direct users onto the same path at night, for them to collect on their way. This currency can then be exchanged for vouchers and discount codes at local shops.

Our strategic placement of Fireballs is the crux of LitTrail’s sustainability. In the day, when walking is relatively safer, Fireballs are scattered on the paths of our sponsors, incentivising students to walk in their direction and providing these businesses with more traction. At night, when shops are closed and streets are darker, the location of our Fireballs are repositioned along well-lit roads we wish to recommend to pedestrians.

How we built it

LitTrail was designed and prototyped on Figma.

We made use of the Material Design Icons plugin as well as screenshots from Google Maps as a base for our map tab and Photoshop to adjust them.

Challenges we ran into

We initially began with a navigation feature which allowed users to commute from A to B along safer suggested routes. It seemed like a feature too good to be true so upon researching, we discovered that large navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze have been approached with a similar idea before but declined. The reason for that was the paths algorithmically determined tended to discriminate against minorities - avoiding neighbourhoods with more people of colour or lower-income households.

At this current stage, we couldn’t come up with a solution so we opted to restrict our target users to just university students on campus. Students don’t tend to require a map to travel around where they study and are already familiar with. We believe that LitTrail still adds value by highlighting the safer of their known options and awarding vouchers no student can say no to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Though this was our first time using Figma, we are proud to have prototyped a working concept of LitTrail. Currently there aren't many apps that address night safety, and albeit it just being a prototype, we hope that LitTrail will be a strong example of what could be done to protect women, non-binaries, and other people in the community.

What we learned

Through this hackathon, we’ve learnt how to use Figma as a designing and prototyping tool, as well as some key UI concepts for mobile app design.

What's next for LitTrail - Safe Route app

If given the opportunity, it would be wonderful for LitTrail to be developed into a working app. More features such as allowing users to report dimly-lit streets and having in-app interfaces for signing petitions urging local representatives for better streets could be implemented to the app.

View our Figma Board here: link