Re-Inventing Gardy: The Guardian in Your Pocket

Gardy, an SOS safety app, struggled with low adoption and poor retention rate, despite a clear need in Moldova, where 1 in 5 people report being victims of crime. I was brought on to redesign the user experience and reposition the app’s value in users' everyday lives.

Year
2022- 2022

Client
Fractal Analytics

Role
Behavioral Designer

Industry
Healthcare

Problem Context

How Gardy Works

In Moldova, public safety is a deep concern - yet the very app built to address this experienced a low adoption and retention rate.

How might we encourage users to engage with Gardy by making safety feel relevant, approachable, and part of their everyday lives?

Gardy operates with a dedicated team of in-house security personnel stationed throughout the city, offering discreet and faster assistance than traditional emergency services like 911.

Research & Insigts

Through in-depth interviews and competitive analysis, we uncovered four key themes shaping user behavior and perceptions:

Make Safety Discreet

Insight: Users don’t want to draw attention to themselves while seeking help.
Strategy: Redesigned the SOS button - moving away from the glaring red button to a subtle trigger tailored to the user’s preference.

Normalize Asking for Help

Insight: Many users associated safety apps with weakness or emergency-only scenarios.
Strategy: Integrate Gardy with familiar platforms like cab services and dating apps to embed safety behavior into everyday routines, making it natural rather than reactionary.

Build Everyday Relevance

Insight: Users struggled to see value in an app they rarely “needed.”
Strategy: We expanded Gardy’s use cases to include plan sharing, real-time alerts, and trusted circle check-ins, making it useful beyond emergencies.

Reduce Financial Friction

Insight: Monthly pricing felt too steep.
Strategy: We repositioned the pricing as a yearly “safety insurance” plan, reducing decision fatigue and aligning with the emotional value of peace of mind.

With new features in place, we focused our efforts to developing Gardy’s onboarding experience to raise awareness and ensure users clearly understood how to use the features from the start.

 Design Intervention

Circle of Safety to
determine Safe Routes

Receive real-time data on the safest routes, including those protected by Gardy personnel.

Discrete assistance through SOS Button

Through a pre-filled comprehensive user profile and live location tracking, the Gardy team will discreetly assist you in any situation

Live Tracking & Updates

Going on a date? Send your plan to your close circle so that someone is always aware of your whereabouts. Track others’ locations without the hassle of worrying about getting a reply.

Other features

  • Making the SOS button discrete

  • Reframing ‘Security’ as ‘Get Escorted’

  • Reframing pricing as ‘insurance plan’

Snippet of Screens

Onboarding Screens

Design Rationale:

  • Used goal gradiency to depict number of steps left to scroll through

  • Each section focuses on explaining product features to increase relevance

  • Use of bold colors, with round shapes and friendly tone to enhance trust and friendliness of the app

  • We also animated the screen to demonstrate how the features works

Other Key Screens

Design Rationale

  • Simplified the screen to show only what’s important to the user

  • Placed SOS button closer to the thumb for accessibility

  • Use of color to demonstrate different states (active or safe)

  • Pop-up only used for additional information

Learning:

Opportunity to work in an in-house product design team: Unlike consultancy work, which typically involves focusing on one project at a time, being part of an in-house design team required managing multiple aspects of the app simultaneously. This setup sometimes made it challenging to isolate the specific impact of individual feature developments.

Cross-collaborating with developers and project managers: This role exposed me to the intricacies of project management tools, the meticulous planning required to approve changes, and the systematic approach to formulating and testing hypotheses before implementation.

Emphasis on testing: Unlike in third-party consultancy settings, where testing opportunities are often limited, I had the privilege of conducting usability tests and analyzing captured data. This experience deepened my understanding of the importance of testing and honed my ability to identify the right metrics to capture user preferences effectively.