Lighthouse Harbor Safety

PROBLEM

With almost 5,000,000 people per year coming to the Oceanside Harbor beach alone, not to mention for other recreational activities such as boating, paddleboarding, kayaking, site-seeing, and fishing, an educational program is needed. Current issues include high numbers of water rescues, boat rescues, confrontations, and wildlife encounters.  The visitors need to be able to access informational and educational materials.

SOLUTION

Create a mobile application that educates the public about safety rules and procedures for all harbor-related activities throughout the harbor.

GOALS & EXPECTATIONS

• To unify safety information and provide education for all individuals who visit the harbor for recreational purposes.
• To make information easily accessible, serving public interest, city of Oceanside, Harbor and law enforcement teams (Police, Coastguard, Lifeguard, volunteers)
• Promote peace, and safe practices throughout the harbor, leading to more harmonious coexistence between recreational users, and to fewer encounters and accidents in the Harbor.

PROJECT CONSIDERATIONS

Scope

With the goal of creating a mobile application, I knew that the app would also need to marketed to get the audience to know of its existence and try it out. I would therefore need signage. This signage would be placed throughout various hot spots throughout the harbor.

Brand

As this was a new project and was not associated with any other Oceanside or Harbor entities, and therefore no branding to connect to, I would need to include: logo design, color scheme, type standards, and naming.

Concepts

A big focus was to educate people since education would be the key that leads the harbor visitors to safer practices. I didn’t want the idea of getting educated to feel stuffy as that would cause the younger generations to have no interest. I decided that if there were quizzes with points, and if I created a character to represent the application, that would lighten things up a bit.

Competition

Competition was non-existent, however, consideration was regarding the city of Oceanside, the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce, and the Oceanside Welcome Center, and Oceanside Harbor Village. All of these had websites but none covered safety training. Neither were any similar apps found for other harbor locations to use as a basis for comparison.

Audience

Harbor visitors to consider would include tourists, locals, and those participating in recreational activities (paddle boarding, kayaking, boating, etc). People within this demographic include every age, education, gender, culture and lifestyle.

The people who come to the Oceanside Harbor have a broad range of behavioral habits. However, a focus would be placed on the visitors that were less familiar with harbor processes and rules, or even those who have not made a point of learning the proper etiquette or associated laws. Most of these visitors would be dressed casually and depending on the time of year, could be wearing bathing suits or recreational attire.

User Testing & Personas

Personas were used for testing the app, each with their own situation that they would need to accomplish. (click each persona image to view.)

Strengths

Encouraging safe practices
When people know the rules they are less likely to get upset
Incentives to use take quizzes on the app and learn more
Helping the police, lifeguards, coast guard, harbor office
Fun and helpful

Weakness

Users without mobile devices
People are lazy and think they already know everything

Opportunity

Educate the public
Reduce accidents
Reduce frustrations
Modernize access to information

Threats

Getting and keeping city interested
Getting marketing approved to post in Harbor