Relative to California, Riverside has a crime rate that is higher than 89% of the state's cities and towns of all sizes. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, crime rates have increased even more. As students who attend UC Riverside, we are becoming more aware of the dangers of returning to campus during the Fall quarter. However, we noticed that there is no instant way to get in touch with help when encountered with a dangerous situation. Thus, we were inspired to make UCR Safe, an app that provides a plethora of safety and security resources for students, faculty, and staff only one tap away.
UCR Safe is an app designed for the specific safety needs of students at the University of California, Riverside. It integrates with UC Riverside safety and security systems including UCPD, UCR Campus Safety Escort Services, and UCR Housing Services to provide a multi-faceted system that provides not only students, but faculty and staff with an added sense of security on the UC Riverside campus. This app provides instant access to campus safety resources, tips, personnel to contact, as well as third-party sources to help you feel more secure on your next walk across the UCR campus!
We built this app using Swift, Xcode, UIKit, Core-Data, and Figma.
The biggest challenges we ran into were time management issues as well as meeting all together as a group virtually. Other challenges we faced were trying to find the right colors to keep our app functionally easy to use and accessible to all, while also trying to incorporate the UCR colors and delve into proper UI/UX design. We also struggled with implementing the calling functionality when facing issues with LSApplicationQueriesSchemes configurations. We overcame this by configuring the plist schemas to contain an array for the LSApplicationQueriesSchemes and implemented strings for tel and telprompt relating to calling functionalities.
We are proud that we are taking the next steps to keeping our campus safe and secure as well as helping our peers feel safe when they are on campus. We are also proud of making an app from scratch in one day!
In the future, we hope that we can incorporate more safety features into our app such as a buddy system that allows students to walk back to dorms and other parts of campus with fellow classmates. We also hope that this app can be further implemented at UCR through having it be a requirement for all students to download during orientation; this can curb the amount of crimes that do take place on campus and help freshmen navigate a new environment more comfortably, safely, and with a larger sense of security. This can also motivate more students to apply to be a UCR Campus Safety Escort as there is currently a shortage on campus. We also hope to incorporate location services and security notifications in the future to help our app cover all aspects of campus security, which can be established through working more closely with UCPD, UCR Housing Services, and more!
