Our project is aiming at empowering women in abusive relationsips by helping them spot their problem and give them an exit. Most of women who are in an abusive relationship don't even realize it, because of the sentimental factor and because an abusive relationship is based on manipulation and a sentiment of guilt, they think it is their fault and accept their situation until they become completely dependent of their partner, sentimentally and financially.
Our goal was to create a project that would answer the problematic
"fighting violence against women and girls in public and private
sphere".
To have a better understanding of the scope of the subject, we each
started by exploring the the theme on our own.
We then made a map of the different actors, beneficiaries and users.
From that, we were able to pick one target, identify their pain
point, their dreal goal and settle on a research question :
The idea of making this kind of application came from the experience of one of our members, another one was familiar with it through his closest relations, and from experience we know that there weren’t any applications to help women in that kind of situation which is why we decided to make one. This kind of situation is way more frequent that one may think and can put lives in danger as well as break families. It is a really serious issue that needed to be responded to and it pushed us to take action.
Once we had our research question, the first step toward creating our project was to define it. We found an idea and detailed it enough to answer the following questions :
Finally we started to think of the features and the user flow.
After drafting a precise proposition, we interviewed several potential users to get feedback on our work. This process was very interresting because it allowed us to understand what features and graphical design was not appealing to our potential target. That is how we learned that we shouldn't pick a pink colour for our pplication or that a feature to assess how healthy the relationship is was missing.
“ I think that creating a real application for this is a good idea because there is none and mixing questions to create a test and identify, to finally arrive at the decision to escape. The only thing missing is the test which I think is essential. But this application is a good idea in the sense that it allows you to think and identify problems quickly.”
“ I believe that a strong repression against people who get caught. We should take this problem more seriously in order to dissuade men from behaving in this way. I believe that the penalties against domestic violence should be stronger and these kinds of issues should be followed more closely. I also think that the people who suffer from this kind of violence should be encouraged to talk about it even though it is difficult, and file complaints.”
“ Unfortunately I have some knowledge on the subject. I myself have been in an abusive relationship or have been badly treated. I have never been physically abused, only mentally. It is very complicated to get out of it, it takes a lot of courage. There is no predefined guide that explains what to do. I was lucky to not be very naive but I think that people can be stuck in vicious circles. Fortunately we are talking about it more and more on the networks, I think it is important to shed light on this kind of subject”