Designing for Calm in Crisis: Reimagining the Campus Safety Experience with BentleySafe

BentleySafe | Design Researcher (in a Team of 4)

Competitive Analysis

SWOT

Usability Testing

Thematic Analysis

UI Redesign

Agile Sprints

IoS

Through usability testing and iterative redesign, we uncovered critical usability gaps in the BentleySafe app and reimagined its interface to better support users in high-stress scenarios. This end-to-end project strengthened my skills across research, analysis, and design, bringing clarity, calm, and confidence to campus safety.

Tools:

FigJam, Figma, Miro, Google Sheets, Figma Slides, Jira

jump to final designs

summary

project goal

SWOT Analysis

competitive analysis

usability testing

participant profiles

data analysis

test ratings

insights

redesigns

marketing strategies

wrap up

Summary

Bentley University Police Department wanted to increase adoption and long-term engagement with the BentleySafe app, designed to enhance campus safety. Through usability testing, thematic analysis, and iterative redesign, we uncovered key barriers to understanding and trust, and reimagined the app’s interface to be more intuitive, informative, and user-friendly—making it easier for students to rely on in everyday moments and real emergencies.

Outline

Problem

This project was initially started in collaboration with Ikigai Labs and their customer Delta Children.
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Ikigai is an AI platform that specializes in structured and time series data – both internal and external. Based on patented Large Graphical Models, it’s designed to work with sparse, inconsistent, and dynamic data, so organizations can accurately predict and plan across supply, demand, people, and budgets.

Ikigai Labs was looking to extend and enhance its existing Demand Planning platform by incorporating a conversational user interface that could help retail executives in their decision-making.
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Our goal was to: how might we enhance engagement in addiction care to better support individuals and stakeholders involved in the process?

Tools

Figjam, Figma

Solution

Conducted detailed stakeholder analysis, including mapping pain points and opportunities.
Employed tools like stakeholder maps and ecosystem maps to visualize gaps and improve care paths.
Brainstormed problem statements and generated prototype ideas, prioritized through an impact-effort matrix.
Developed current-state and future-state journey maps to visualize member experiences and prototyped proposed improvements.
Presented findings and recommendations in a final presentation with Q&A for the Eleanor Health stakeholders.

Duration

February - May 2024
(This was a 4-person team project as a part of my Design Innovation course at Bentley)

Project goal

Our aim was to increase the adoption of a critical campus safety tool

Evaluating the usability of the BentleySafe App would help improve its intuitiveness, relevance, and perceived value for students and faculty.
Key Objectives:

Understand how users interact with key safety features.

Explore how different user groups (students vs. faculty) perceive and utilize the app.

Identify usability pain points and barriers to effective use.

Gather actionable insights to inform a more inclusive, user-centered redesign.

SWOT Analysis

Laying the Groundwork with a SWOT Analysis

To get started, we conducted a quick collaborative SWOT analysis on FigJam. This helped us assess the app’s internal capabilities and external landscape, ensuring that our design decisions were both user-centered and context-aware.

Strengths

Easy access to Incident Reporting
‍No login required, making it universally accessible
Friend Walk encourages peer-to-peer safety

Weaknesses

Information overload in features like “How to Respond”
Chat function lacks cancel option, leading to false alerts
Inconsistent content density—some features are sparse, others overwhelming

Opportunities

Campus Map could be moved to the Home screen and made interactive
Privacy statement placement could be improved for transparency

Threats

In emergencies, users may prefer calling 911 directly
Excessive reading during a crisis delays action
Crucial buttons are buried, making them hard to find
Competing third-party safety apps offer faster, richer features

Competitive Analysis

Learning from Competitor Apps in the Safety Space

To uncover opportunities and set a high design bar, we analyzed three peer apps—Google Safety, bSafe, and the University of Oregon app. This helped us evaluate BentleySafe’s strengths and gaps in real-world context, especially around usability, accessibility, and emergency communication.

Similarities: All apps employ some form of location tracking, sharing details with contacts, and chat/contact police features.

USABILITY TESTING

Testing the BentleySafe App with Students and Faculty

We ran usability tests to evaluate how well BentleySafe supports students during high-pressure situations, uncovering gaps in clarity, flow, and task completion speed. We defined 5 main tasks to test users:

Task 1

View campus map

Task 2

Get help for a medical emergency

Task 3

Let a contact know you’re okay in an emergency

Task 4

Ask a contact to track you as you walk

Task 5

Modify notification preferences

What We Did:

Created a detailed moderator guide to ensure consistency across sessions
Recruited 6 participants to understand their responses in real-world scenarios
Captured behavioral observations and time-on-task metrics to identify friction points
Synthesized findings thematically to prioritize redesign efforts

Participant Profiles

Recruiting a Combination of Participants Across University Demographics

We recruited 6 participants from the Bentley community through convenience sampling. While we achieved a balanced gender split (3 male, 3 female) and a mix of faculty (3), undergraduates (2), and graduate students (1), the sample skewed heavily toward international users (5 out of 6).

Given the short turnaround time for the project and the timing clashing with students' end-of-semester exams, this was the best that we could do; had we had more time, we would've tried to recruit more participants with an even distribution across demographics.

Data Synthesis and Analysis

Making Sense of the Mess: How We Synthesized Insights

From raw feedback to clear direction using Miro and Google Sheets

After conducting usability testing, we collected observations, user quotes, and ratings in Miro and visualized patterns in Google Sheets. This helped us cluster issues, spot trends, and prioritize design changes that would make the greatest impact.

Miro

Google Sheets

Overall Test Ratings

What the Ratings Revealed: A Quantitative Snapshot of User Experience

Users took the longest to locate the Campus Map, I’m Okay, and Medical Emergency Help features, largely because they were buried under buttons with unclear or unintuitive labels. In contrast, the Friend Walk and Notification Preferences were more easily found, thanks to stronger alignment between user mental models and the app’s feature placement.

The app scored mostly average ratings across all metrics: ease-of-use, desirability, and satisfaction.

Qualitative Insights

Beyond the Numbers: What Users Said and Felt

Insights are organized under categories for easier navigation. Click on each thumbnail to explore pain points, direct quotes, and the context that shaped our redesign decisions.

Redesigns

From Feedback to Fixes: How User Quotes Shaped the Redesign

Each redesign directly reflects what users told us—and what they didn’t. Based on the insights above, we reimagined key flows to reduce cognitive load and improve access to high-priority features. Dive into each redesign by clicking on the thumbnail to see what changed, why it mattered, and how it solved the real user frustrations we uncovered.

Marketing Strategies

Boosting Brand Awareness and Driving Adoption

Through research, we realized that redesign alone wouldn’t drive engagement. Many students weren’t even aware of the BentleySafe app—let alone critical features like Bluelights or AEDs. To bridge this gap, we proposed strategic awareness efforts to get the app on students’ radars and make its vocabulary part of campus culture.

Orientation Integration

Introduce the app during student orientations and encourage real-time downloads.
Explain safety-related terms like “Bluelights” and “AEDs” so users feel confident navigating the app.

Educational Support

Develop a Workday-based tutorial on how to use the app, modeled after Bentley’s Harassment Prevention training.
Conduct monthly emergency response training sessions—making at least one session mandatory.

Empowering Internal Support

Train Bentley’s IT Help Desk to handle app-related questions and troubleshoot user concerns more effectively.

Celebrate and Communicate

Send email newsletters highlighting success stories or app usage stats to build trust and encourage downloads.

Future Considerations: Test improved designs with a broader user base including students, faculty, staff, and campus contractors before handing off to AppArmor for development.

Wrap Up

Presenting to Stakeholders and Reflecting on the Journey

Our team concluded the project by presenting our findings and redesign recommendations to both the Bentley University Police Department and AppArmor, the third-party platform powering the app. Alongside the presentation, we delivered a comprehensive report documenting our research, usability testing, and redesign rationale to guide next steps in the app’s development.

WIN

Hands-on ownership across the product lifecycle

I led end-to-end—from user research and testing to prototyping, synthesis, and final presentation. I also drove the creation of the report and was the primary contributor through most phases, while using agile methods to keep us moving.

LEARNING

High-stakes design needs low-friction usability

In emergency contexts, even small friction—unclear labels, buried features—can mean big consequences. Simplicity, visibility, and user vocabulary familiarity are critical.

WISH

More time + broader participant base

Conducting usability testing at the semester’s end made it hard to recruit undergrad participants. As a result, most testers were international students, which may have unintentionally skewed perceptions of certain emergency terms like “Bluelight” or “AED.”

Defining Problems and Prioritizing Solutions

The team collaboratively brainstormed problem statements, representing the challenges of various stakeholders such as EH staff, insurance providers, the community, pharmacies, the government, healthcare providers, members, and pre-members.

Through voting, we prioritized and refined the list to eight key problem statements requiring immediate attention. To further organize and evaluate these, we employed an impact-effort matrix. This helped us identify the different view points within the addiction care ecosystem.