Verizon Smart Family gives parents the ability to track their children’s location, monitor online activity, and filter bad content.
The app’s latest feature “Driving Insights” records a child's driving trips and detects potential crashes.
Although Verizon’s crash detection feature was functional, it was impossible to prevent false positive alerts, which lead to parents being alarmed unnecessarily. I was tasked with finding a way to restore user trust while also preventing as many future false alarms as possible.
How might we build a user friendly feedback system and amend for possible faulted alerts?
Legal constraint:
The final feedback that will be collected to improve Crash Detection’s performance must come from the parent user.
Technical constraint:
The only feasible way of collecting data on whether it was an actual crash or not that our app detected is by asking our users.
Scope constraint:
The design must not drastically change the feature to minimize engineering L.O.E. (Level of Effort)
For this project, our main users are parents of kids ages 8 to 17. Our secondary users are the kids in the family who will have the app installed on their mobile devices.
I was the Product Designer on this project. I designed the end-to-end feature experience, conducted the usability test, spoke with stakeholders and prepared final designs for engineering handoff.
I worked closely with our internal Product Manager, the external client team from Verizon, the Research Team, and a UX Copywriter. I also routinely shared and gotten feedbacks from the design team.
“Driving Insights” feature was previously designed by another team and inherited by me. I was able to turn around a released product that never had user validation to a holistically designed crash detection experience that has been tested and vetted by real users.
Receiving an alert about your child potentially being in a car collision is a scary thing. Before I begin, I wanted to understand what parents would do when they receive a crash alert from their child. I found the answer I needed looking through user interviews our research team has conducted on this subject with eight parents.
When asked what are the first things they would do when receiving notification about a crash their child is in, parents revealed they would:
call the child
check the site of the crash on the map
look for something that says the child is alright.
This allowed me to understand the user tasks and their mindset so I can create user stories based on it. It also confirms for me parents are looking for the truthfulness of the alert, and we should look for ways to help them discern it.
Following the user tasks and journey, it’s clear that parents would have the ability and emotional willingness to help confirm whether it was a real crash or not after they have cleared the situation surrounding the crash alert.
I explored different flow variations for parents to confirm or deny the occurrence of a crash. Placing it after parents delete the crash alert or when they do something not relating to the crash alert.
Flow 1
Crash confirmation as a pop-up dialog after the parent dismisses the crash alert.
Not a good solution since pop-up after pop-up is not good UX practice, thus increasing user error. I considered either taking out the previous pop-up entirely or combining both into one.
This brings up the question, do parents want to keep the crash information even if they confirmed it wasn’t a crash? This was one of the questions we asked during the usability testing later on.
Flow 2
Crash confirmation as a card placed above the trip details that entails the crash.
This solution was better since it is less interruptive. However, we risk lower visibility and not getting the parents’ feedback.
We decided to put both flows into usability testing.
Even if parents confirmed it wasn’t a crash, our app still caused them a great deal of stress.
How can we keep the parent’s trust, and how can the feature keep hold of its integrity and value?
We explored a couple of ways to tackle this.
Solution 1
One idea was to ask the parent to classify the crash for us. The follow up shows curiosity, and it adds more value to the confirmation.
Solution 2
I want the collision confirmation to be valuable insight to the user too. Their feedback will update the map, location history, and let their family members know that everything is okay.
Solution 3
A sensitive tone of voice for this topic is extra crucial. I worked with our UX copywriter to make sure the copy is empathetic yet concise.