Five Northwestern students are testing an app to help their peers avoid walking alone at night.
GroupWalk, which is currently under development, is the brainchild of a group of sophomore Design for America members tasked with improving campus safety. The app aims to facilitate safe travel and foster community by allowing fellow students who are walking to and from the same areas at similar times to arrange meet-ups and go together.
“We were all really excited to try to do something to make our campus safer,” said McCormick sophomore Cassie Coravos, a member of the GroupWalk team. “So we picked that as our problem statement and then went into research.”
Each fall, administrators at Design for America pose several problems for students to solve with their projects. The national organization, founded at Northwestern in 2009, encourages students and community members to create social impact through design.
The GroupWalk team began by researching crime statistics around NU and conducting surveys with students about how safe they feel on campus, eventually narrowing the objective down to ensuring students have friends to walk with at night. The team found that students often resort to walking alone when they have no one to travel with, and that long wait times discourage students from using resources such as SafeRide.
“We also did a lot of user testing, which is basically us talking to other students about what we came up with and what they think of it,” said Weinberg sophomore Justin Hatfield, a team member.
The group said it regularly goes to Norris University Center to get student reactions about the developing project, surveying students or letting them experiment with mockups of the app.
In its current state, the app would allow users to choose starting areas and destination areas on a map, as well as the time they plan to leave. The app lists students with the same areas and times, allowing a user to contact others to arrange a walk.
“All of our meeting locations are centered around blue lights,” Hatfield said. “That’s just an extra safety precaution we put in.”
In order to keep the app’s users limited to NU students, the group hopes to get permission from the University to link students’ accounts to their net IDs for verification. They are also experimenting with how much student information, such as gender, age and height, to show potential walking partners, Hatfield said.
The group encourages walking not just in pairs, but also in groups, to further ensure safety and to emphasize the app’s social aspect.
“We wanted to make sure there was a secondary focus, not just safety,” team member and McCormick sophomore Martin Hewitt said.
The team is working on bringing in a new member to help program the app, as well as marketing and spreading the word. The students hope their continual user-testing will lead to positive testimonials about GroupWalk.
“We want to make sure we’re doing this for the students and that we don’t get too far away from the people we’re testing this for,” said team member Emily Ellinger, a Weinberg sophomore. “So that we’re performing to what they want and not just make something that no one’s going to use.”
Weinberg sophomore Bisola Sosan said she believes GroupWalk is a good idea for facilitating “campus togetherness” and safe traveling without having to wait for SafeRide or shuttles.
“It is something that I would potentially use,” she said. “It seems like a much easier system of getting a group of people who may be walking back to your area safely.”
The GroupWalk team hopes to release a preliminary version of the app by Fall Quarter.
“We got a lot of buzz about it lately,” said team member Hayley Blythe, a McCormick sophomore. “A lot of people (are) talking about it, which is exciting, and we’re hoping to keep that up for next year.”
