SICHANA
An app to help girls living in Informal Settlements report incidents of Gender-Based Violence
OVERVIEW
SiChana was a non-profit started by my sister and I in 2013. SiChana worked with women in urban slums in Kenya to identify and assist with key issues around womanhood in the slum. The idea for the app was born out of years of hearing stories about gender based violence and the lack of safe infrastructure to report it. We designed a concept for an app, SiChana, and tested it out with women and girls in our network.
THE DESIGN CHALLENGE
Can we use technology to create a safe space for girls living in urban slums to communicate and take action on issues around sexual violence?
THE PERSONAS
Need, Assumptions, Goals and Constraints
User Testing
We did extensive research with developers, researchers and, most importantly, the users. We talked to many women and girls about their needs and goals, building deeper empathy with the users so that we could design something functional and productive.
We tested a prototype of the app with 50 users.
We held a co-design session with paper prototypes
Key learnings:
Girls were most concerned about privacy and anonymity
Distress Function was not appropriate
Instant reporting tool was viewed as the most important part of the app
Key Features
A community forum for anonymous posts that are tagged as either “mood updates”, “inspirational” or “question”.
A guide for users who want to file a report to the police.
An instant reporting tool within the app, along with an option to report the location of the incident so as to create a heat map of where sexual violence is most prominent.
A Red-Zone heat map for sexual violence reports
A resource center with advice, resources and guides for issues on and around gender-based violence. This includes emergency contacts and information on organizations working in the field.
Instant Report Tool: Flow
Final Designs
After iterations and collaborative design feedback, we came back and gave the app a fresh new look. We changed our color scheme to something bolder and more user accessible.
