Haven
Timeline
36 hours
Results
- Figma MVP Prototype
- 1st Place in Product Hackathon
Discovery
Our goal was to address the hesitation young adults face when reporting incidents to administrative organizations. Going to the police or institution often feels worse than doing nothing. What other options did college students have? Is there a way to provide community-based justice and/or awareness?
Our Pitch
Haven is a dual-purpose mobile platform that lets college students anonymously report safety incidents and access harm reduction resources — without going through institutional channels.
Research
Why are college students choosing not to report to their institutions?
Surveying over 100 college students, we:
- Quantified the frequency of incidents to evaluate our market share
- Identified the common factor in why students choose not to report
- Measured the potential impact of our product
From these findings, I developed three user personas to represent student archetypes that would benefit from our product.
Wireframes & Styling
Prototype
Onboarding
Anonymity is the product’s core promise, so it had to be established at the very first screen. Verification through a university email confirms community membership without collecting any identifying information — building trust before asking users to engage with sensitive content.
Harm Reduction
Consolidating resources into a single, map-based view reduces the cognitive load on users in high-stress moments. Crowdsourced ratings add a layer of peer trust that institutional directories lack.
At a glance, students can see what services are offered, and evaluate how safe a provider is based on crowdsourced reviews.
Incident Map
The core insight from our research was that students don’t report because they fear being identified — not because they don’t want to. Removing that barrier through anonymous, crowdsourced reporting creates a form of community accountability that exists entirely outside of institutional channels. The toggle between Help and Harm modes keeps the two use cases distinct, preventing the app from feeling overwhelming while addressing both sides of the safety problem in one product.
Outcome & Reflection
Haven took 1st place at the Tufts Spring 2024 Producthon, validated by a panel of judges across research quality, design execution, and product viability. Competing within a 36-hour window made the win meaningful — but it also exposed the limitations of what we built.
With more time, I would have pressure-tested the anonymity model more rigorously and pushed individual flows further. Crowdsourced incident reporting carries real risks around false reports and misuse, and while we acknowledged this in our pitch, the design doesn’t yet have a clear answer for it.
What I took away most as a designer was the value of leading with data. The survey results didn’t just inform the design — they were the pitch. Grounding every decision in what users actually told us made the product defensible under scrutiny, and that’s a habit I’ve carried into every project since.