Domestic Violence Web App: SFHacks Presentation
Hackers: Alex Wu, Chirasree Mandal, Jake Fletcher, Jennifer Huang [UC Berkeley ’22]

Introduction:

  • Domestic Violence is a pressing issue in the United States, affecting people of all genders, races, classes, and sexual orientations. 
  • On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.1

  • Survivors of domestic violence experience lasting physical and emotional violence, lasting economic damages, and often lose their sense of security for themselves and their loved ones. 

  • Many resources like hotlines, search engines, and websites, and apps exist to help people who are being experiencing domestic violence, but some people may have their internet activity monitored by their abuser and will have difficulty accessing these resources. 
  • For example, many informational pages and hotlines will have escape buttons or disclaimer messages such as:

  • When apps try and use this “disguise” approach, the app’s UI gets in the way of its purpose or is publicized too much to be useful to survivors


Design Question: Can we engineer a domestic violence resource portal that is discreet, untraceable and stress-free for the user?



Introducing Maison-Autelier, a boutique fashion house that doesn’t exist. 
We designed a boutique website that showcases several collections from this “designer”. Underneath, this web app is a portal to personalized domestic violence resources that are delivered with a discreet phone call.  
How it works: Upon trying to purchase any item of clothing, a user is prompted to input their phone number for more information. Utilizing the Twilio API and BeautifulSoup for webscraping, the user is then called discreetly with information on how to access the top three domestic violence shelters, websites, or hotlines in their area. 

Our Name:

Maison - Autelier
home + portmanteau(auxiliary = aid, assistance, atelier = workshop of a designer)

UX Walkthrough


Example Audio


Tech Stack

  • Python Flask for the backend with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap with Jinja for templating on the frontend
  • BeautifulSoup, selenium and Google Chrome Canary for headless webscraping
  • APIs
  • ipinfo - discreet location services
  • Twilio - communications

Media and Attributions

  • all images are labeled for reuse from Google Images or Unsplash

What We're Most Proud Of

  • We're very proud of being able to produce our minimum viable product, with a solid user flow from the front page of the web application to a phone call with personalized resources. Delivering a working product that has the ability to change someone's life in a dangerous situation.
  • Technical Highlights: