Skip to main content
Dave Navarro McDonald
Work

Safety Personalization

Safety Personalization

Your Risk Level, Not Ours

TripIt's Neighborhood Safety Scores give travelers address-specific ratings from 1 to 100. But a number on its own doesn't tell you what to do with it. Everyone's threshold for acceptable risk is different, and telling users what "safe" means rarely lands well. I designed a Safety Personalization feature that lets users set their own risk tolerance and automatically receive alerts when any destination in their itinerary exceeds it. The feature launched within Neighborhood Safety Scores and received positive feedback from travelers who appreciated having control over their own safety preferences.

How might we enable users to set personal safety preferences and stay informed about their surroundings in unfamiliar places?

Translating Numbers Into Decisions

The first design challenge: making a 0–100 score scale actually usable. Raw numbers don't map to decisions. Working closely with UX Research, Product, Marketing, and industry experts, I divided the scale into five named risk levels (lowest risk, low risk, average risk, high risk, and highest risk), each with descriptions that helped users calibrate against their own experience. Key design steps:
  • A slider users could adjust to set their risk level, with descriptions updating in real-time as they moved it. Warmer colors indicate higher risk, making the scale visually intuitive without relying on text alone.
  • A selection flow that let users assess and choose a level in a way that resonated with how they actually think about safety.
  • Alerts for itineraries that exceed a user's set threshold, delivered via push notifications, in-app messaging, and email.
To ensure the feature was cohesive with TripIt's broader ecosystem, I shared user flows demonstrating each interaction (entry points, safety alerts, notification methods) with engineering, product, and customer support. Their feedback shaped the final design.
Safety risk level slider with dynamic color and label updates

A Personalized Safety System That Adapts to Each Traveler

The completed feature launched inside Neighborhood Safety Scores, letting users set a risk level from their profile. When travel plans are imported, each destination's safety score is automatically compared against the user's threshold. If a destination exceeds the 20-point range for their selected level, an alert is triggered in the itinerary. Highlights of the final design:
  • Dynamic Slider: Color shifts from cool to warm as risk increases. Labels and descriptions update in real-time to reflect the selected level.
  • Toggle for Control: Users can turn safety alerts on or off, giving them flexibility over how and when they receive safety information.
  • Alerts and Notifications: Push notifications and itinerary alerts fire automatically when travel plans exceed the user's set threshold.
Safety alert triggered in itinerary when destination exceeds threshold
 Positive feedback from travelers reinforced the core hypothesis: people want control over how safety information is presented to them, with the ability to apply their own judgment rather than rely on a system-defined threshold.
Push notification and in-app safety alert for high-risk destination

Related projects

AI Subject Line Optimizer
Act-On Software

AI Subject Line Optimizer

Designing Act-On's first customer-facing generative AI feature: a subject line analyzer that uses each account's own performance history to generate personalized alternatives.
Read case study
Groups: Putting Data in Context
Sparta Science

Groups: Putting Data in Context

Designing a way for Sparta Science users to compare individual performance against meaningful peer groups rather than the entire dataset.
Read case study
COVID-19 Guidance
TripIt

COVID-19 Guidance

Designing a centralized, digestible source of COVID-19 travel restrictions inside TripIt so travelers could stop hunting across government sites.
Read case study
Settings Refresh
TripIt

Settings Refresh

Volunteering to lead a full rebuild of TripIt's outdated web settings, bringing it up to the accessibility and usability standards of the mobile app.
Read case study