Travelfemme

A Critical Design Feminist Travel Site Design

Background

Travel Sites—places that aid in booking trips, rating destinations, and learning what places to see, such as Frommer’s and Lonely Planet and Nomad List abound on the internet. There are also many sites that exist to highlight the dangers women face while traveling. I decided to create a site that would allow women to evaluate travel destinations based on the unique concerns they face. This was to serve two purposes, one to make women aware of their best options for travel, but the greater purpose was to highlight all of the compromises women have to make in daily life in order to guarantee their health and wellbeing. Where on earth do women really exist in complete safety?

1. First Concern - Male as default

Even as we attempt to reduce discrimination against women, we exist under certain assumptions that have long remained unchallenged, with female needs viewed as secondary or subordinate. Male is generic, and female is special. I wondered if it was possible to bring awareness of the way we regard the problem as “just the way it is” and how this is harmful. In the developing world, we have a tendency to assume that women experience greater threat of violence and harm. This allows us to ignore our own failings, the alarmingly high rates of violence against women at home, and disregard the way daily life is designed without regard to women’s concerns.

2. Second Concern - The Reality of Life in Public Spaces

There are 3.4 billion women on the planet, just under half. All of them will experience some form of sexism in their lifetimes in public spaces, either through catcalling, inappropriate touching, and outright hostility from men. Many women, if not most, accept this as entirely normal.

Issues unique to women…

Violence against women is a serious issue, but there are also several smaller ways women’s lives are made more difficult. Feminine hygiene products are not readily available in public bathrooms, and they are extremely costly. In some places women are given few options. Birth control options disproportionately do not take women into account. And women are charged more for basic grooming products than their male peers. All of these deficits go regularly ignored.

Physical Safety

The rates of physical violence in many places is alarmingly high. 1 in 3 women experience intimate partner violence worldwide. 1 in 4 women are expected to face sexual assault in their lifetimes.

Acting Defensively

Because women live under the perceived threat of violence at all times. This results in certain behaviors that are detrimental to their daily lives.

Feminine Hygiene

Menstruation is unavoidable for a majority of women between the ages of 10 to 51. Hoewver, while public restroomsalways include toilet paper, feminine hygiene is not guaranteed, and it is expensive. The average woman is expected to spend $18,000 on feminine hygiene products in her lifetime.

Birth Control

Access to hormonal birth control is not easily available and emergency contraception may be altogether restricted, making fear of pregnancy a significant concern

Percieved Safety

The prevalence of violence against women has had profound effects on the way women perceive their relative safety. From an early age women are taught to be on guard, not to walk alone, to monitor their drinks, to be very careful about how they dress.

Because the threat of violence is real, women are required to act defensively in their every day lives. When women are alone, nearly every single act is calculated. ‘Do I have headphones on to avoid catcalling?’ ‘Do I have my keys at the ready?’ ‘Does that man I’m walking past look like he’s going to harm me?’

Globally, only 60% of women feel safe walking alone in their own neighborhoods at night, as compared to 80% of men. Defensive planning is treated as a solution to this issue, but it’s merely another symptom, one that allows people to accept violence against women as a regular fact of life.

How Can I Address These Issues?

Proposal

There are numerous info graphics and reports on the status of women. These are easily accessible, however, this wealth of valuable information often goes ignored or is not easily assimilated. An alternative is necessary.

A commercial website can subtly highlight certain deficits just by virtue of the options it provides.

The site is intended to point out deficiencies in the way countries treat women through the use of filter categories and returned search results. Users searching for ideal places will quickly find that those ideal places do not exist. Women’s safety is not guaranteed anywhere and women live in significant discomfort when it comes to dealing with their own biology.

Thus it serves to inform users of which places to travel to that will best suit their needs, but also highlight how there is significant work that needs to be done to increase equity between the sexes.

Specific Aims

  • Provide info
  • Raise awareness
  • Challenge status quo

Initial Paper Prototyping

I started out with rough sketches to get my ideas out and to test what filter categories resonated with my user group.

User Testing

Round One - Initial Visual Design

I got feedback on the filters, and the way that information was laid out in the results pages.

Round Two - After First Round of Testing

People found the redesigned results page too disorganized, but the new filters worked well.

Final Landing Page

I coded the site using jquery and bootstrap. I reworked the filters, changed the header, and made the destinations smaller so it took up less screen real estate.

Final Rating Scheme

I chose to assign grades on a variety of categories: the percentage of women who felt safe walking alone at night, the rate of intimate partner violence, the general violent crime rate, available legal protections for women, and sexual health. They were graded A-F, and then a GPA was calculated.

Further Development

Where to Go Next

I built a foundation, but along with adding more cities, there’s additional functionality that I want to add—resources for women when they’re traveling, where they can buy certain products they might need, such as emergency birth control, specific feminine hygiene products. Also the ability to make user accounts and favorite certain destinations to refer back to later, as well as an alert functionality that notifies users about developing situations in cities they plan to travel to that might affect their health and safety as women.