Towards Design Guidelines for Safety Experience in Mobile Applications for Tourism

In the service industry, ensuring user safety experience is a central factor in building trust and promoting positive user experiences. When designing mobile applications for outdoor and community activities, it is essential to prioritise awareness of safety as a part of social sustainability. In this paper, we present a set of design guidelines for enhancing the safety experience in mobile applications in the context of tourism, as well as an evaluation of the guidelines. A design thinking approach is utilised as a framework for understanding users’ safety needs, reviewing key design theories, developing a set of safety guidelines, and evaluating and redefining guidelines. The collected data and prototypes were analysed by identifying common themes and key insights using qualitative content analysis. As a salient finding, we report how each guideline was applied and how different safety aspects were integrated into the application designs. The results of the study indicate that applying the guidelines enhanced the design process by maintaining the focus on users’ safety aspects and integration in design. Community-based aspects were part of the guidelines with an emphasis on safety and social sustainability. Adapting psychological and social safety aspects into specific features proved to be the most challenging, highlighting the need to expand the guidelines with additional support and examples to improve clarity. This research adds value by highlighting users’ safety in mobile application design by developing a novel set of five safety guidelines. Integrating these guidelines aims to enhance the user experience of safety and encourage social engagement.