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

One of our first design challenges was finding a way to check in on a victim immediately after a car accident. While our crash detection technology is able to detect a car accident, it is unable to tell if the user has been harmed or needs help.

At the moment a car accident occurs, the victim is usually not using their phone, so the first step was to figure out how to grab the user’s attention. In order to do this, we zoomed in on a medium that often gets overlooked in mobile UX/UI design– sound. Working with a sound designer, we developed a ring-tone that would command attention without being too alarming, in an attempt to not further raise the stress levels of the victim.

The sound was tied to an alert notification that displays on the phone’s lock screen. Upon opening the notification, the user is asked if they are OK or need help. However, because the user may not respond in severe cases where their phone is out of reach or they have been knocked unconscious, the app waits 5 minutes for a response before automatically notifying the rest of the family that a crash has been detected.

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 performed our first round of design testing using a Figma prototype with test subjects over a Zoom conference call. User feedback was generally positive over what had built, but it was hard to get feedback around the SMS notifications that were sent to alert the other family members. In order to test these, we used a less traditional guerrilla tactic of texting our friends and family members unprompted to see what their response would be. To our delight (and at our family member’s blood pressures!) we were able to illicit a variety of responses and feedback.

We saw that family members were immediately concerned but also showed healthy skepticism over whether a car accident had actually occurred. The told us which key words in the text message stood out to them, helping us refine the copy. Their feedback also helped us realize that the experience would be better if the car accident text message alert wasn’t the first time that the user would be hearing from Life360. Instead, we chose to add a “welcome” SMS to the flow, letting the user know that the crash detection service had been enabled to better prime them should an accident later be detected.

"This was such a traumatic experience for both me and my son. I'm unbelievably grateful for Life360 being there for us that day, and can't thank them enough for taking the time to notify all of the people associated with the app."

— Karena & Son

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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