Why Pepper Spray

"Shh! Someone is lurking in the dark..."

campus safety is a big deal

(move around the curser below to explore the story!)

It was a dark, dark night. You just got off of class and walked briskly across the campus. While thinking about what you learned and why the professor talked so fast today, you did not pay much attention to the surroundings. As you passed the parking lot area where the light was dim, a suspicious figure flashed through, sneakily approaching you from behind.
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Fortunately, you finally felt alarmed when the person was only few feet away. "Right, the pepper spray!"
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Unfortunately, it was your first time using the pepper spray and due to the poor design of the product you failed to operate it within 10 seconds. Frustrated and terrified at this point, your hands started shaking, causing the pepper spray to drop on the ground.
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"Hand me your wallet ! Or..." The silver blade on the right hand of the perpetrator was shinning ever so ominously...

BAD GUYS could be everywhere, but a BAD DESIGN should be the last thing to hold you back when you are in danger.

Living in an open campus where anyone could go anywhere, we saw the potential of designing a safer and more convenient user experience of pepper sprays.
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project summary

Through researching, brainstorming, and getting user feedback, we managed to greatly improve the practicality and efficiency of using a pepper spray. The intended redesign product was a basic type of pepper spray brought from target, as shown in the images below.

Finding the Problems

"Sos! I just accidentally sprayed myself..."

Research Method

Our target user group are college students who study in UCSD. Specifically in our sampling the gender proportion is female : male = 3 : 1. Usually females are the main users of pepper spray, however it's also important to include males in our study because typically they have less experience with the pepper spray thus can provide us fresher perspectives in regard to the potential problems of the product design.

We planned to conduct the user interview anywhere in an open space. This was done out of safety concerns: otherwise participants could be uncomfortably affected by the lingering spicy stimulus after performing a task of using the pepper spray. What's more, in a lot of scenarios users would be in need of pepper spray in an outdoor place because indoor places generally require some kind of authorization and are relatively safer.

As previously mentioned, every group member interviewed 3 girls and 1 guy about user experience pertaining to the pepper spray, following our pre-set list of questions. In addition, each interviewer recorded a video (after asking for consent) each time they interviewed a participant. This comes in handy for elaborating on our interview notes and enriching our understanding of user behaviors. After recording the interviews, we transcribed the interviewee responses onto our data collection sheet.

We used a master-apprentice model when structuring our interviews. This means that we wanted to hear the user walk through and demonstrate their understanding of the pepper spray without hearing any leading or biased questions. we asked both qualitative and quantitative questions/tasks during the interviews. Particularly, we are interested in how useful the pepper spray would be when users are actually in a dangerous situation.

User Interview Round 1

After asking each interviewee 11 questions and analyzed their responses, there were a couple of intriguing trends for both quantitative and qualitative data.

(you can hover the boxes to see more information.)

Findings of Quantitative data

Significant Time Difference between Two Testing Trials

During the interviews we asked the users to try to use the pepper spray twice, the first one took place few questions earlier than the second one. What we found out was that quite a few number of users needed at least 20 seconds to successfully use the spray in the first round. By the second round of testing, however, most users managed to keep the time down to 10 seconds. This dramatic shortening of time could indicate that the design of pepper spray was not beginner friendly.

Surprisingly High User Evaluation Score about Pepper Spray

Averagely speaking, users gave a high score for the design of pepper spray, which was at odds with the fact that a lot of users struggled to use it at the first round of user testing (which would be elaborated more below). This discrepancy was particularly fascinating because what users reported about a design may not reflect the real quality of that design. This finding implied the importance of observing how users actually interacted with a product instead of listening to what they say about it.

Findings of Qualitative data

The Design is not Intuitive Enough

A lot of users being interviewed were first time users of the pepper spray, which helped us uncover a major problematic aspect of its design -- lack of intuitiveness. In short, users commonly encountered problems like:

"I didn't know there was a safety mechanism embedded in the pepper spray!"
"so how could I unlock the safety mechanism?"
"now I unlocked it, but where exactly should I press to release the spray?"
"And how hard should I press the button?"

The Design is not Effective Enough

Pepper spray, defined as a defensive weapon against bad guys, should be very effective in use in an actually dangerous scenario. Nevertheless, our interview revealed a lot of space for the pepper spray to improve in this sense. In the second round of product testing, we asked interviewees to use the pepper spray while pretending to be in a dangerous situation. Unfortunately a lot of users made some kind of mistake, which could have serious consequences when they were in real danger. Specifically those mistakes include:

"wait I forgot I needed to unlock the safety measure!"
"I’m too panicked to accurately aim the bad guy because the spraying range is so narrow! "
"The spicy chemical gets on MY hands! Now I’m also being “spiced” and I can’t escape effectively..."

Problem Statement

After categorizing the typical trends and problems described as above, we came with a concise but accurate problem statement --

How could we make the user experience with pepper spray more intuitive and efficient ?

Brainstorming solutions

"You know, that pepper spray is not gonna fix itself..."

Trade-offs Analysis

In order to address the impotencies of the original design without impairing on the advantages of the design, we decided to do some trade-off analysis on its existing features. We compared our chosen pepper spray to four other real types of pepper spray to accomplish this. During the process we identified two kinds of trade-offs: Security vs. Efficiency and Simplicity vs. The Gulf of Execution.

Security vs. Efficiency

Since pepper spray is dangerous, it is important for the bottle designs to incorporate safety measures. This can prevent children from using the spray and also prevent the spray from going off at the wrong time. However, since the safety measure needs to be secure enough to prevent premature use, it could possibly delay use when needed.

Simplicity vs. The Gulf of Execution

Another comparison in pepper spray design that is important to consider is the simplicity of the design versus the ease of bridging the gulf of execution. A simple design is important as to not confuse users of how to use it, but can also be too simple and make it hard for them to figure out how to use the spray.

Being aware of the trade-offs above, we then started brainstorming possible redesign prototypes. While we took reference from some of the competitive products, we also incorporated creative ideas on our own.

Prototype A & B

We created two prototypes for an updated version of pepper spray. This was to use the double-diamond process of design where we would go back to our interviewees and get second opinions on the two redesigns in the final iteration stage. Overall speaking we made improvements on the following aspects:

We made the safety locker easier to be unlocked
by replacing the safety lock with a simple cap on the top of the spray
We added clear signifier for where should be pressed to release the spray
‍so that users wouldn't be confused how to start
We enlarged the spray range of the pepper spray
‍so that it won't require users to have a accurate aim when being stressed
For both prototypes we added a practice canister filled with water
helping beginners to familiarize themselves with the design without wasting the actual spray.

Prototype A

Prototype B

The Final Prototype

"Now take THAT, you bad guys lurking in the dark!"

User Testing Round 2

After drafting two potential prototypes, we made a questionnaire to interview users (some were from the previous interview some were not) about what features they deemed helpful for the user experience with pepper spray. Eventually we extract the main suggestions to further improve the prototype as follows:

remove the rag feature on Prototype A due to its excessive nature
find a better way to prevent leakage
Users prefer the canister from Prototype A but the cap and nozzle from B
Make sure the cap is easily opened but also safe for children

Final Design

At last, we combined the ideal features from both prototypes A and B considering the additional interview responses from our second round of interviews. I would walk you through the key features of our final prototype.

(hover the png below to have an overview of key improvements)

clear signifier to press
without the twist-cap safety mechanism as in the original design, this button should be a lot easier for users to understand.
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‍protective shield prevents leak
each time the red button is pressed, the shield will lower so the spray can exit the canister, but immediately after the button is released, the shield will go back up and prevent leakage.

easier way to pop off the added cap structure
pressing a small red button on the side of the canister will unclick the cap quickly, allowing users to have an alternative way of opening the spray in a dangerous situation. The canister itself has finger ridges for maximum grip, which can also help signify how the users should press the side button.

refillable pepper spray
We included a hole on the bottle which can be refilled either when the spray expires or the owner uses all the spray. This is done by a similar injection method as lighters have where users will not come in contact with the spray and simply inject it right into the bottle.

Bad Guy Alert

Pepper Spray

An Upgrade Project