Shoal Bike Safety App

At the University of California at Berkeley one of my fellow students had identified a trend among bikers in the San Francisco Bay Area. He had noticed that an increasing number of bikers had started wearing GoPro cameras on top of their helmets with the sole purpose of having evidence of their innocence in case of a collision with a car.

In the course ‘Designing the Mobile Experience’ we then set out to solve the problem of unsafe biking with an app. Instead of simply helping the bikers with their reactive strategy to prove their innocence in case of a crash we decided to take a proactive approach to make it safer to commute by bike in the first place.

The resulting user experience was based on the assumption that “the more bikers regularly ride on a given street, the safer that street becomes”. Consequently a biker using the app would be recommended the most popular route on their daily commute based on how many other bikers chose that route. The final prototype received an honorable mention from the jury for its innovative approach to a very real problem.