PRODUCT DESIGN CASE STUDY · 2026
iAlert
Personal safety built for how emergencies actually unfold in Nigeria.
ROLE
Product design, UX strategy, interface, copy, front end build
TOOLS
Figma, Claude, React, Leaflet, Vercel
MARKET
Nigeria · Primary
The short version
iAlert is a personal safety app concept for the Nigerian market. One press alerts your chosen contacts with your live location and starts recording evidence. Every other decision in the product exists to protect that single moment.
I designed it end to end and built it as a working prototype, so the decisions could be tested instead of described.
The decision that shaped everything else
Most safety apps treat contacting the police as the obvious first move. In parts of Nigeria, it isn't. Police involvement can slow a situation down or escalate it, and the people carrying that risk understand it far better than any product team does.
So iAlert asks where you are during setup and sets its defaults from there. In a high risk corridor like Kaduna or Kano, police auto notification defaults to off. Contacts are still alerted instantly, capture still runs, and reaching the police becomes a deliberate action you take rather than one taken for you. Choose Lagos and the default flips on, with a six second countdown and a cancel, because the wrong alert should be recoverable.
This is not a setting buried in a menu. It changes what the SOS screen does, and you can watch it change by flipping the toggle.
Two different kinds of urgency
Not every unsafe moment is an emergency. Sometimes you only want someone watching while you get home.
Live location sharing is a separate and deliberately calm flow. Green, not red. No alarm, no recording, nobody jolted awake. Pick who watches, pick how long, stop it whenever you want. Folding this into SOS would have made people hesitate to use either one.
What I left out
No fire or ambulance dispatch. No NGO directory. No safety score. Each one was defensible on its own, and each one would have diluted the thing the app exists to do. Six screens that hold up under stress beat twelve that photograph well.
Built, not mocked
The prototype above is a working front end. Inputs validate. Settings change behavior across screens. The map pans, zooms, and searches anywhere in the world. Reports you file appear in the list and can be deleted. Recording keeps running when you navigate away, with a timer and a stop control waiting on the home screen.
Building it this way meant the weak decisions surfaced while there was still time to change them.
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