Verizon Family: Safe Walk, a New Safety Feature
I led the experience direction for Safe Walk, a feature that lets someone share their live location with trusted contacts and escalate to SOS if needed. I coordinated with Product and Engineering teams to define flows and necessary states for the feature.
Designing for moments of uncertainty
Safe Walk needed to make it easy to share your location, escalate if needed, and cancel without accidental triggers.
Keeping trusted contacts informed
When a Safe Walk session begins, trusted contacts get an instant notification and can follow the user’s live location. If an SOS is triggered, they receive real-time updates so they can respond quickly.
Mapping the experience
We also ran parity studies to assess how competitors approached escalation and live-location sharing, ensuring Safe Walk met or exceeded market expectations.
Then, we translated requirements into detailed user flows, mapping out the steps from starting Safe Walk to ending a session. We also mapped variations and edge cases, such as canceling SOS before sending, immediate SOS activation, and receiving SOS cancellation.
These flows clarified dependencies, surfaced edge cases early, and gave our teams a shared reference.
Driving adoption and trust
Safe Walk’s release contributed to higher adoption rates of the Verizon Family app, increased engagement among families using Parental Controls, and an uptick in satisfaction scores. This set the stage for Phase 2 with planned integration for professional emergency responders.
Safe Walk in action
See how Safe Walk keeps trusted contacts informed with live location updates and SOS alerts. This short demo walks through setup, starting a session, and how alerts help you respond quickly when safety is a concern.