HELLO
Life360 Crash Detection protects every Circle member on every drive. Life360 on average, detects over 100 collisions every day.
Free and for the whole family, Life360 Crash Detection senses any collision over 25mph and immediately reaches out to the driver or passenger involved. If help is needed or we don’t get a response, we’ll alert the Circle and all emergency contacts with the vehicle’s location.
Objectives & Goals
At Life360, we’re striving to build a membership for the modern family focused on safety. Our core products are built around location and driving safety, including Crash Detection, a feature that detects when you’ve been in a car accident and dispatches an ambulance to your location.
On a weekly basis, we receive heartfelt stories from users around the country thanking us for helping save one of their family member’s lives. These stories are a huge source of motivation for our company, and with over 16,000 car accidents occurring each day in the U.S., it became clear that we needed to find a way to expand our life-saving technology to more of our Life360 families.
We set out to develop a new product offering with three goals in mind:
Thinking through the UX
Life360 faced a critical challenge: how to immediately check on a user after a car accident. While our crash detection technology could detect accidents, it couldn't determine if the user needed assistance.
To address this, we focused on a less-explored aspect of mobile UX/UI: sound. We collaborated with a sound designer to create a distinctive alert tone that would grab the user's attention without causing undue alarm. This alert, paired with a lock screen notification, prompts the user to confirm their safety.
Understanding that immediate response might not always be possible, the app is designed to automatically notify family members after a 5-minute wait, ensuring timely assistance in critical situations.
Experience Design
Crash Detection Activation Flow
Crash Detection Victim Response Flow
Crash Detection Victim Response "False Alarm" User Flow
Crash Detection Victim Response "Call 911 Now" User Flow
Validating the UX
We initially tested our design using a Figma prototype and Zoom calls. While we received positive feedback on the overall concept, gathering insights on SMS notifications proved challenging. To address this, we took a less conventional approach: sending unannounced text messages to friends and family.
This method, while unconventional, yielded valuable insights. We observed immediate concern and healthy skepticism from recipients, identifying key words that triggered strong reactions. This helped us refine the message copy. Additionally, we realized the need for a more gradual introduction to the service. By adding a preliminary "welcome" SMS, we aim to better prepare users for potential accident notifications, enhancing the overall experience.
Launch and Learn
Once development and ample testing of the feature were both completed, we first launched to 5% of our U.S. user-base to collect quantitative and qualitative insights. Within days, we began to see that a handful of users were getting into car accidents and experiencing our new feature. Again applying scrappy user research tactics, we cold-called our users to hear more about their experiences with the product.
This was by far the most rewarding part of the process, hearing firsthand the role we had played in helping our users through an otherwise stressful and vulnerable moment.
One user explained to us how she had been ejected from her friend’s car and laid unconscious while her Life360 app notified her friends of the accident. Users commented on how the feature made them trust Life360 more. Interestingly, even the users that experienced a false positive (e.g. the phone detecting an accident when dropped on the floor while driving) reported that they felt safer as a result of having the feature.
Meanwhile, our analytics data showed that our iOS users were responding to our alert notification sooner than Android users, likely due to our iOS app being able to play an alert sound even when the phone is on silent. This has lead us to prioritize prompting Android users to give Life360 special permissions to play sound in these scenarios.
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