2026 · Product Lead & Designer
Whspr
A crowdsourced urban intelligence platform for women navigating city spaces
Role
Product Lead & Designer
Team
Solo — product lead & designer
Research Methods
User Interviews, Secondary Research, Competitive Analysis
Platform
Mobile Web App
Duration
6 sprints
Overview
It started with something I kept doing without noticing. Every time I went somewhere new at night, I'd text three friends before leaving. “Is this bar okay to go to alone?” “What's the vibe there at night?” Yelp doesn't answer that. Neither does Google Maps. That knowledge lives in DMs and disappears the second the conversation ends. 81% of women have experienced harassment in a public space. 70% text or call someone to share their whereabouts when going out alone. That's not an edge case, that's baseline behavior for most women I know, myself included. Whspr exists to make that knowledge findable instead of letting it disappear.
My Role
I led the research, the product decisions, and the interaction design end to end — the interview study, the information architecture, the contribution flow, the trust and verification system, and the visual design system. I built the Claude Code prototype solo.
Tools & Methods
- Next.js + Vercel
- Supabase (Postgres)
- Mapbox API
- OpenAI GPT-4o-mini
- NYC Open Data (NYPD)
- Figma
Objectives
Surface Hidden Knowledge
Make the safety knowledge women already share in DMs and group chats findable by anyone, not just the people already in that chat.
Avoid Alarmism
Build something that helps women navigate a city with more confidence, not something that makes the city feel scarier.
Design for Trust
Let anyone browse freely, but require real verification to contribute, so the feed stays credible without needing heavy moderation.
The Research
Secondary research pointed to three things: perceived safety, not crime data, drives how women move through a city, and familiarity is the strongest predictor of it. Interviews with women in NYC confirmed the behavior was already happening informally — warnings in group chats, not public reviews, because that felt exposing. Trust and anonymity were conditions for contributing, not nice-to-haves.
Why This Matters
The Reframe
“I went in thinking this was a safety problem. It's not, not only. It's a knowledge problem. Women already track and share and warn each other — what's missing is somewhere for that knowledge to live that doesn't flatten it into a star rating or amplify it into fear.”
The Solution
Whspr is a crowdsourced urban intelligence platform for women navigating city spaces. Search a place and see signals — short, observational, tagged with time and context. Getting There & Back shows the real walk to transit, well lit or not, busy or not. Area Info shows what's open nearby right now. No scores. Just what someone who's actually been there noticed.
Design Solutions
Insight 1
Existing safety apps like Citizen raise the salience of threat, alerting users to incidents that aren't even nearby — research on them describes users feeling more stressed and alarmist, not more prepared.
Recommendation 1
No star ratings. Short, observational signals tagged with context instead, so a contribution reads closer to testimony than a transaction or a fear alert.
Insight 2
Whether a piece of safety information feels credible depends heavily on who's sharing it, but asking for gender on every post adds friction people won't tolerate.
Recommendation 2
Gender lives on the account, not the signal. Self-declared once at sign-up, shown automatically after.
Insight 3
Anonymity was a condition for contributing, but so was trust — interviewees wanted to read from people they could trust, not just fast content.
Recommendation 3
Trust is verified, not assumed. Browsing is open, posting requires ID verification, and the trust score factors in contributor history and corroboration instead of a blunt access block.
Insight 4
The women I interviewed didn't want another guess. They wanted real transit stops and real walk distances, not app-generated approximations.
Recommendation 4
Getting There & Back and Area Info both pull from Mapbox. Real data, not synthetic.
Insight 5
A block that's well lit at 6pm and empty at 1am isn't describable with one number.
Recommendation 5
Day/Night toggle instead of one blended score. Two pieces of information, kept separate.
Outcomes
What Worked
Every interview confirmed the underlying behavior was real — not one person questioned why this needed to exist.
The verification-for-trust model landed well. One participant asked about it unprompted, meaning users understand authentication as part of what makes a signal worth reading.
Areas for Growth
No formal usability testing on the interface itself yet — the interviews validated the need, not the flow.
The moderation and corroboration layer is designed but not live. Trust scoring exists in the data model, not yet as active weighting logic.
Learnings
Knowledge Needs Infrastructure, Not Invention
The knowledge people need already exists. Most of the time it's just sitting in the wrong place — unsearchable, undervalued, or split across a hundred private conversations. Good design doesn't invent that knowledge. It gives it somewhere to live.