Leading Light – Startup UX from Concept to Prototype

Challenge

Traditional navigation tools prioritize speed and efficiency, often ignoring how users feel while traveling. For many—especially women, students, and nighttime commuters—this creates stress, avoidance behaviors, and reliance on informal safety habits like texting friends or rerouting around perceived danger zones.

Our challenge was to design an app that made safety the core navigational feature, all while contending with incomplete public data, limited technical resources, and no external funding.

Solution

We followed a Lean UX approach, beginning with qualitative user research—over 10 interviews with urban pedestrians—to understand emotional decision-making during commutes. Journey mapping revealed a clear three-phase model: preparing a route, navigating it, and recovering after. We built the product around these stages.

Key design features included:

• Visualized danger zones using community reports and soft glowing map overlays
• Safer route recommendations based on aggregated safety data
• One-tap emergency messaging to alert preselected contacts
• Fast, icon-based safety reporting to reduce interaction load during stress

We iterated on multiple designs using paper prototypes, wireframes, and a mobile-first interface in Figma. Each version was tested and refined based on user feedback. As the sole front-end developer, I built the working prototype using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and React.

Outcome

The prototype tested well with users and gained interest from campus safety advocates and local safety groups. However, it never shipped due to major challenges:

• Reliable safety data was difficult to source and verify
• The idea was seen by investors as something easily replicated by large platforms
• The product depended on critical mass for user-generated reports, which was hard to reach without funding

Still, Leading Light demonstrated how to align emotional usability with technical constraints. It became a strong proof of concept and a valuable exercise in full-cycle UX and front-end delivery—from initial concept to functional prototype.