What is Safety Check?

The Safety Check feature for LINE Messenger allows you to inform others about your safety and check on your friends when disasters occur. In an emergency situation, you can let everyone know about your condition simply through updating your status through Safety check. You can also check your friends' situations without needing to contact each person directly. 

What problem did we solve?

Before the launch of Safety Check, users voluntarily used status messages to inform others of their safety status to avoid the above problems in the event of a disaster. By we recognized the needs of these users and launched Safety Check in order to better serve our users' needs and help in the event of a disaster. 

Design Goal and Process

The design goal of Safety Check was for users of all ages to be able to easily discover the Safety Check service and quickly register their safety status in the event of a disaster.

To achieve the above goals, there was a process of collecting information about disaster experiences through interviews, conducting design, verifying designs through usability tests, and enhancing the design by reflecting the results of the usability tests.

Since the frequency of disasters in Korea is relatively rare, it was helpful to better understand our users through interviews. We also learned from the usability tests that safety checks should be exposed more aggressively to promote awareness of safety status registration. In addition, the safety status access process should be more simplified than designers think to make it easier for users.

Through the safety check design, considering the specificity of the disaster situation, users can quickly recognize the disaster situation when it occurs. In addition, because it is straightforward to use, anyone can easily enter their "safety status" and quickly check their friends' "safety status" without requiring much learning, even though it is not a frequently exposed service.

Design features

A banner announcing the disaster

The red banner makes it easier for users to recognize disaster situations. This banner is not normally seen within LINE services, so users can intuitively know it is a different situation than usual.

Designed to consume less data

We designed the feature with minimal text, lines, and surfaces without images, colorful graphics, or motion to minimize data loading in a disaster situation.

Message templates considering the disaster situation

Users can quickly enter messages by providing message templates even under challenging situations, such as injuries during disasters.

Safety Status Checklist

Provide a list of friends who have registered their 'Safe Status' so that users can check on their friends and see who needs help with just one scroll action. In addition, users can intuitively check friends' situations by the 'Safe' and 'Affected' badges. If you have a new friend who has registered 'Safe Status,' the list is highlighted so that you can view the newly updated friend's safety separately from the list.

Use color to help recognition

It uses green (Safe) and red (Affected) colors symbolically and repeatedly to make it easier for users to recognize information about 'Safe' and 'Affected.'

The case of the level 6 earthquake in Miyagi and Fukushima 

On March 16, 2022, Safety Check was activated when the magnitude 6 earthquake struck Miyagi and Fukushima. About 2 million users reported their safety status to their friends through safety status registration.

In addition to quantitative indicators, it went viral several times (about 230 times) on social network services like Twitter. Most of the responses were positive, such as "I was able to see that everyone was safe by checking LINE safety," "It's a tool that allows me to contact you even though it's a hard time," and "It's convenient because I know your situation without contacting you when something happens."

Safety Check, beyond communication tools

Safety Check goes beyond just being an efficient communication tool in disaster situations to provide more helpful information to users. In the future, we would like to expand the service to areas where we can quickly request help in disaster situations, such as marking nearby shelters and asking for safety registration from friends.

In conclusion

We think Safety Check is more valuable because it is on the LINE app we use daily with our family and close friends. In the future, we would like to design a service like Saftey Check that can create synergy within LINE  and communicate with users.