Radarea
Imagine you are in an unknown city. How do you know you can walk around safely?
Radarea is a community-driven tool to register crime incidents and display them on a heat map, created to help people move safely around cities.
The product
Radarea allows users to enter crimes that happened to them or people they know, adding location, time, type of crime, and a description.
Occurrences can be filtered by location, date, crime type, and more, and map settings can be customized.
We also built a scraping feature that gets crime data by scraping news sites, Twitter, and official police sources.
Radarea can also be a form of political pressure, a database created and supported by citizens to pressure governments to act on once-forgotten areas.
The process
Crime can happen to any person, so Radarea needed to be easy and accessible.
The tool had to be available on the go since it was possible users would look for the website as soon as the crime happened. That meant the site should be accessible and mobile-ready.
We had a small list of requirements that quickly transformed into a huge list. We met users to help us rank features using the prioritization matrix and feature auction, where they would receive fictional money and would spend it on items of their preference, to help drive our MVP.
After the creation of the updated requirements list based on user feedback and expected efforts by the rest of the team, I was responsible for creating the wireframes that captured every single interaction.
It’s important to note that this was a personal side project, so me and my partner Jadson didn’t have a budget, a team, or even a lot of free time. It was launched as an MVP with a very minimum process.
My roles and responsibilities
- Branding and visual design
- Planning
- User journey mapping and creation of epics and stories
- Creation of wireframes and clickable prototypes
- UX and UI Design
- User research planning and facilitation
- Development in PHP, with Maps and openID integrations
- Evaluation of metrics and user feedback
The results
The project was a great success. In its first days, thousands of users registered and posted actively to help make cities safer. We were able to collect a lot of feedback from users to improve the next versions.
Radarea gained a lot of attention from the local media, getting coverage from all major TV and newspaper companies in the capital of Brazil.
We were invited by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice to showcase our work to an audience of security professionals and police directors. We were also invited to a design exposition In Brasília, the capital of Brazil.
