Current solutions to the parking problem

Before I jumped into designing, I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of this parking problem as a whole—online statistics show that city parking leads to a plethora of issues, but I wanted to learn more about how drivers tackle this problem currently—what are their solutions? Do they work?

So, I surveyed 50 city drivers from a variety of busy U.S. cities.

The goals of this survey were to:

• Discover preferred methods/strategies drivers use to find parking currently.
• Discover which apps drivers may/may not use to help find parking—if any.
• Discover ways participants decide if a parking spot is ideal or not (distance, price, security, etc). What do they prioritize and look for the most?

Participants were collected through Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Slack groups.

Here were the key takeaways:

• 84% of respondents look for parking without guidance/apps, and rely on luck to find a street parking spot—and if they can’t find any spaces, a majority opt-in to pay for paid parking.
• Out of 16% of the respondents who use guidance/apps to find parking, 50% use the standard maps app on their smartphone, and 50% use apps like Spothero and Parkwhiz to find parking spots.

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• 68% of respondents said distance is the most important factor when deciding whether a parking spot is ideal or not.
• Some respondents emphasized the fact that they try and avoid parking in the city as much as possible, because of the emotional and financial stresses that come with it.
• Participants’ most common negative experiences include: Trouble reading signs, exorbitant prices for parking garages, and parking tickets.

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Empathizing with city drivers

In order to consolidate the survey findings, and to help empathize with city drivers even more when designing the app, creating an empathy map was crucial to the design process.

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Learning more about competitors

After conducting the survey, I discovered that there were participants who used parking apps (although not many). I wanted to learn more about those parking apps, their pros and cons, and what Parkcelerate can do better to potentially attract more users than these competitors.

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Strengths I focused on implementing include:

• EV parking support within the app (for electric cars).
• An easy way to switch between host and driver accounts.
• Built-in walking/driving directions to the parking spot.
• Apple Pay support (for iOS devices only).
• Clean map UI with smooth performance.

Also, weaknesses I avoided:

• Not including a list view.
• Not allowing map access without searching first.
• Making it tough to perform key tasks—such as renting out a parking space or booking one.
• Not including a review/rating system for parking spots.

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Information architecture & user flows

Now that I've learned more about city drivers and their problems with parking, along with pros and cons of competitors, it was time to start working on the mobile app. But first, I had to define how pages will be prioritized, linked, and labeled—creating a sitemap helped me with this.

Two different dashboards had to be created, one for the driver and one for the host, and switching between them should be a seamless experience.

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For the Parkcelerate app, I went with the assumption that booking a parking spot and hosting one were the most important tasks a user can perform.

So I then proceeded to create user flows for those tasks, to gain a better understanding of which pages should be prioritized for testing.

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Brainstorming & testing

It was time to sketch! By analyzing competitor apps previously, it gave me a lot of ideas as to how I wanted Parkcelerate to stand out in terms of layout.

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Once sketches were finished, I moved onto the wireframes, where I got into a little more detail as to how I wanted the app to look and feel overall.

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Before investing too much time into the visual design of the Parkcelerate app, I had the opportunity to conduct a usability test with the wireframes. So, I put together a low-fidelity prototype and began testing.

The test objectives were: 

• Determine usability issues throughout the low-fidelity Parkcelerate mobile app.
• Pick up on hiccups/frustrations participants were having throughout their tasks.
• Understand overall mood as participants completed their assigned tasks.

I conducted the usability test over Zoom, and had participants screen share for the entirety of the test. I had participants perform two tasks, one being to book a parking spot, and the other being to switch to the host account and host a parking spot.

In conclusion, the mobile app was fairly straightforward to use for all participants—with the main confusion being the labels and icons.

Revisions I made to address this include:

• Making the clock UI more clear with time labels and easy-to-understand icons.
• Shortening labels and adding more icons to the parking spot card (on map page).
• Adding minimum pricing instead of fixed pricing (for peak hour price changes).
• Changing header sizing across all pages for consistency.

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Branding & designing the app

Unique branding is one of the best ways to make a memorable impression on users—and would help distinguish Parkcelerate from competitors easily.

After testing different color palettes and typography choices, the style choices below reflected Parkcelerate's brand message best—stress-free parking for all. The brand logo is unique and memorable too.

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I then started to design the high-fidelity mockups, taking the revised wireframes and style tile into account.

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A second round of usability tests

After mockups, it was time for me to assemble a prototype and run a second usability test—to catch usability issues that may have been missed previously or arose after designing the mockups. All objectives remain similar with the last test.

Here were the findings:

• The quantity label on the photo stack card was misinterpreted to some as the number of parking spaces, not number of photos.
• The "Add Price" label wasn't a clear way of identifying the alternate pricing feature.

Changes based on the usability test findings were made in the updated prototype.

Overall, this usability test concluded with less feedback than the last—but also different feedback. If anything, it shows how much the usability of the interface improved since the last usability test. I am officially one step closer to development!

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What I've learned, and plans moving forward

This project was definitely one of my favorites, since I finally got to work on an idea that's been on my mind for the past several months.

One of the toughest, but most rewarding things I've learned with this project was quantifying qualitative data (with the surveys). I received a lot of responses, and sorting through piles of data was something I've never done before.

I also dove extremely deep into UI Design and branding. It was my first time designing such a large number of pages, in addition to a unique brand logo that was created solely using the pen tool in Figma.

The plan moving forward would be to start designing the user authentication pages of the app, in addition to other key pages—then run a new usability test with those before diving into development.