Public safety · Government sector

Women Safety Service

Punjab built a women's emergency service, then almost no one used it. Two years after launch it had reached 0.3% of the women in the province. We evaluated the whole service and redesigned it as an ecosystem rather than an app, rebuilding awareness, trust and access across digital, physical and organisational touchpoints.

Role

Service design
UX research & strategy

Scope

UI/UX design
Creative direction

A safety service is worth nothing until a woman believes it will answer.

90%

of helpline calls were hoax or accidental

93%

would use a safety service in a violent situation

Inside the PSCA command centre, a wall of live city camera feeds and a female operator working the safety helpline — The infrastructure was already there, a command centre, live city feeds, trained operators. What was missing was not technology. It was a service a woman could find, understand and trust.

02 · What we learned

Not a broken app. A service women could neither see nor trust.

Most women had never heard of it

Outreach relied on seminars, leaflets and banners, so it reached very few people.

The app was hard to use in an emergency

It dialled instantly, shared location only during the call, and gave no way to practise beforehand.

The service was not seen as reliable

Women feared retribution, local stations varied in quality, and reporting to male officers felt uncomfortable.

Two archetypes, one service

Half the women wanted to act but did not know how. The rest already carried gadgets and speed dials. The service had to hold both.

User archetype, The Help-Seekers, preventive measures, pain points, needs and channels

User archetype, The Go-Getters, preventive measures, pain points, needs and channels

03 · Design principles

Three rules carried every decision that followed.

The research pointed at trust and visibility rather than features, so the principles had to hold across the app, the street and the organisation, not only the interface.

Be visible before you are needed

A safety service found during an emergency is already too late. Awareness became a design surface, not a marketing afterthought.

Earn trust through people, not screens

Verification, female responders and community refuges do what no interface could, they make the service feel safe to use.

Prepare, do not only respond

Demo mode, safer routes and reviews move the service upstream, from reacting to an emergency to preventing one.

04 · A multichannel safety service

Four pillars, shifting from reactive response to prevention.

The redesign spans a rebuilt mobile app, a digital awareness strategy, community-led Safe Spaces, and female first responders. The app was reimagined around emergency reality: SOS countdown, predictive live chat, safer route suggestions, demo mode, and live location sharing.

Safe Spaces let local businesses act as temporary refuges, while influencer campaigns and pre-call messages carry the service into everyday visibility rather than waiting to be searched for.

Redesigned app

SOS countdown

Predictive live chat

Safer routes

Demo mode

Digital awareness

Influencer campaigns

Pre-call messages

Platform outreach

Safe Spaces

Partner businesses

Temporary refuge

Community network

First responders

Female officers

Trained response

Trusted contact

Service design process overview, the service journey, information architecture, system view and value exchange map around the app home screen

05 · The redesigned app

One unmistakable action, and everything else one tap away.

The 2020 app buried the alert among competing options and shared a location only while a call was live. The redesign puts SOS at the centre, adds a countdown for accidental presses, and keeps chat, location and safe spaces permanently within reach.

The app home screen on a phone resting against a concrete wall

The Emergency SOS countdown in hand, police called when the countdown ends, with emergency call and live chat below

What changed

Every change answers something the research found.

Drag across the comparison below to see the 2020 app against the redesigned concept.

The original Women Safety app, emergency help chat, alert screen and location screen

2020

REDESIGNED

User verification

BeforeNone

AfterNADRA verified

Why it mattersEliminates hoax calls through the app

Onboarding

BeforeIntro video

AfterDemo mode

Why it mattersRehearses the emergency before it happens

SOS

BeforeInstant call

AfterSOS countdown

Why it mattersBuffer time when the button is pressed by accident

Live chat

BeforeNo prediction

AfterPredictive text

Why it mattersSpeeds up the conversation with the operator

Location

BeforeCurrent only

AfterLive sharing

Why it mattersLoved ones can follow the journey, not just police

Routing

BeforeNo suggestion

AfterRoute suggestion

Why it mattersPoints the user to the safest way home

06 · Beyond the app

Interface work alone could not fix reliability.

So the proposal reaches into the organisation: women First Responders trained through a two-month gender-responsive policing programme, PTA-carried pre-call awareness messages on every connected call, and NADRA verification behind sign-up. A revised service blueprint and value exchange map traced the new flow of trust between women, businesses and the authority.

Where the digital and physical halves meet

Safest route

Not the fastest way home but the safest.

Safe Space pins

Refuges visible before they are needed.

Location reviews

Secure, partly secure or not, by women who were there.

Live sharing

Contacts follow the whole journey.

The safest route on the map with Safe Space pins, a location card for Cafe Nataliya and the location review legend

Scan to verify

Feeling unsafe? Come inside.

A woman passes a shop carrying the Safe Space poster, points her phone at the QR code, and the app confirms the place is registered, with a safety score from the women who have been there before her.

A Safe Space poster with a QR code hanging in a lit shop window

The Safe Space verifier on a phone, point towards a QR code on a Safe Space storefront to verify the place

Verified Safe Space, Luggage World, safety score four and a half out of five

Scan to verify

A woman passes a shop carrying the Safe Space poster.

Bus stop poster with steps to take when a woman comes to your safe space, beside a social post announcing a registered Safe Space

Creating awareness

A service 70% of women had never heard of.

That cannot be fixed by improving its screens, so awareness became a design surface of its own.

In public space

Posters set out the five steps to take when a woman comes to your Safe Space.

Online

Registered businesses announce themselves on social media so it reaches the audience.

Try the prototype

Walk the redesigned app end to end.

Open in Figma ↗

Outcome

A service women can see, trust and reach before the emergency.

One under-used app becomes a network of touchpoints, digital, physical and organisational, reachable before, during and after a moment of risk. What follows are the outcomes the proposal is designed to produce, not metrics from a live deployment.

Accidental activation reduced

A countdown before the call replaces the instant dial that made most helpline traffic accidental.

Anonymous misuse eliminated

NADRA verification behind sign-up removes the hoax calls that were consuming response capacity.

Trust rebuilt through people

Female First Responders and a two-month gender-responsive programme answer the discomfort of reporting to male officers.

Emergency support extended into the street

Registered Safe Spaces give a woman somewhere to go in the minutes before help arrives.

The service shifts from reactive to preventive

Demo mode, safer routes and reviews move support upstream, to the decisions taken before anything happens.

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