Safe Community was created to provide people with an overview of crime levels in different areas. This is a community-driven project enabling citizens and local unions to report different types of offences committed anywhere in Estonia. The project is aimed at people who are planning to buy a home or parents who wish to find a suitable area for schooling their children. It is designed for the three Baltic states and there is an English version for travellers.

Design

Safe Community required a substantial amount of graphical elements (for example icons representing different types of offences) to make the site usable and easy to understand. Most elements of the site are done in vector format, so they would be reusable in other media.

At first glance, the icons might seem too colourful but this is necessary for the users to be able to read the map quickly and get an understanding of what type of problems are most common in a given area.

User interface

The user interface is designed to leave maximum space for the map area, so users could examine different regions at the same time (it is easy to make the main menu and the sidebar hidden or visible). The layout of the menu is as simple as possible, leaving out all unnecessary forms, so users would be willing to fill in the ones that are displayed. More importantly, the menu forms are given in a way that requires the users to only make choices without having to write anything. This was a critical element to providing the information in different languages without having to translate the content.

Statistics and other features

The additional features of the site are statistics of all the crime types and time durations, the option to subscribe to the newsletter about a specific region and crime types, which is sent to users by e-mail, and a widget, so the local government sites and neighbourhoods can have local information presented on their site.