Polaris

Design

Background

Tourists/travelers found themselves in a difficult situation in a foreign country don’t know what to do and whom to ask for help. On the other hand, everyone wants to do good, but don't always have tools for doing this and don't know how can help. In the era of modern technology it's difficult to find a person without a mobile phone. So, why not make such a tool and develop a mobile application?

Task

Mobile application that allows travelers to seek help from the locals, and to the latters, in turn, provides the opportunity to help.

Application Requirements:

• Easy and intuitive for a user. A person in a stressful situation should be able to navigate and ask for help easily;
• Having travelers a part of the target audience it was necessary to provide language barrier problem solution;
• Users should need a minimum number of clicks to ask for help or respond to a help request;
• Displaying help requests on the map, so that people who are able to help understand their geographical location;
• Not making people who refused to help feel guilty;
• To offer protection against cheating.

Solution

For easy communication within the team and with the client, we have identified potential users:

• users ready to help — Angels of Polaris;
• users who create help requests.

Android platform was selected for application MVP. For the quickest access to the application users log in through Facebook — the most popular international social network. The chat room is designed according to the best international practices. The map shows help requests and Angels of Polaris. Thus, the user knows the number of Angels nearby.

When people find themselves in a stressful situation, it is often difficult to articulate the circumstances in which they find themselves. To help them in creating a new request, we have added most popular templates.

Template dialogue

To solve the problem of the language barrier, we have developed a template dialogue. Thus, users and Angels of Polaris communicate with each other by means of prepared phrases that are grouped by types of requests.

Send location

In a new city it is difficult to navigate, so, we added the function of sending the location directly to the chat.

Public chat

It may happen that one Angel of Polaris is unable to provide the necessary assistance to the user, or in the process of communication he realizes that he cannot help. In order not to return the user to the first step (creating requests) we have developed a public chat, which can offer assistance by several Angels of Polaris.

Angels of Polaris are ready to help, but, for various reasons, they sometimes fail to. In order not to arouse their sense of guilt, a special notification was developed. The system will send an interactive notification of a new request to 10 Angels nearby. If an angel is ready to help, he responds positively to the notice and proceeds to chat with the user. If he cannot help at the moment, he rejects the notice, but it is not shown within the application.

To protect against cheaters, we have added rating (the function to say "thank you"). In the first version, we only collect the data without displaying it in the application. Subsequent versions of the application will display the rating of each Angel of Polaris, thus, informing a user that he is trustworthy.

Additionally our team has developed a logo and a slogan for this application. Name of the project was taken as a basis. Polaris — is the guiding star for travellers for all times.

Criteria for the slogan: brief, showing the essence of the application. As a result, option «Polaris — community that lights your way» was selected. For the logo was chosen a concept which combined a pin on a map and a star.

Client testimonials