Parking Buddy

FOCUS
USER-CENTERED DESIGN PROCESS
TIMELINE
APRIL 2021 - JUNE 2021
ROLE
UX Designer
TEAM
Allen Zhou
Alida Moungchan
Alejandro Strifel
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PROJECT BRIEF
A mobile tool that will streamline the parking experience for drivers planning their next excursion. Parking Buddy aims to help users find quick and reliable parking at common locations.
PROBLEM
In a COVID-scarred society, there are individuals who are immunocompromised or otherwise phobic of large crowds or high-capacity locales. As thus, when planning an excursion from a household, it is important to know the capacity and parking availability of the target destination to avoid either a situation where one arrives and there is no available parking, or one arrives and the destination is already serving too many people for the individual to be comfortable.
SOLUTION
A mobile application where users can travel and park with ease through features like spot availability, navigational tools an instant in-app parking payment.
Parking Density Information
User can see parking density information on the map to inform them of their trip plan.
Navigation Tool
The in-app GPS system allows the user to directly navigate to their desired location.
Pay for Parking In-App
User can pay for parking seamlessly on their device.
OUR PROCESS
01
Research
| User Interviews
| User Personas
| User Journey Map
02
Ideation
| Design Requirements
| Storyboard Samples
| Information Architecture
03
Prototyping
| Low-Fidelity Prototype
| User Testing
| High Fidelity Prototype
USER RESEARCH
We conducted semi-structured user interviews with four individuals from various age groups and backgrounds.  Interviewees provided insights on their experiences when finding parking at various locations from the grocery store to local parks. From these interviews, here are our findings that guided us on the next steps of the project:
USER PERSONAS
Our team developed two user personas to help us empathize with our user groups: our primary user group being frequent drivers who often go to busy areas and the secondary user group being infrequent visitors to busy areas. Referring to these personas throughout the design process helped us understand user needs and considerations.
USER JOURNEY MAP
The user journey map depicts the experience of one of our personas, Kevin, throughout his trip to the grocery store. The pathway begins when Kevin is planning his trip through the process of leaving the parking vicinity of the grocery store. The main sentiments we portrayed were confidence, anxiety, and frustration. Using the details in our user journey map helped us ideate the design requirements in the next phase of our projects to help alleviate negative feeling levels.
DESIGN REQUIREMENTS
From our user research phase, we identified three main requirements to incorporate in our mobile application to address user desires and pain points:
STORYBOARD SAMPLES
Our user storyboards served to depict experiences that our two personas might have with the product that our group is designing. Illustrating this flow helps our stakeholders understand use case scenarios for our product. From these interactions, we were able to identify some key design solutions in our application. The visual stories conveyed in our drawings shaped the decisions we chose to define in our information architecture map.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
The information architecture maps depict the framework of our application. This map is an organizational tool to plan the information that will appear throughout the progression of different user flows on the mobile application.
LO-FI WIREFRAMES
The information architecture maps depict the framework of our application. This map is an organizational tool to plan the information that will appear throughout the progression of different user flows on the mobile application.
USABILITY TESTING
After designing frames for our low fidelity prototype, we interviewed 4 potential users to evaluate the usability of our mobile application by analyzing their experience completing 3 different tasks.
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     Task 1 - Look up a location and find an available parking lot Task Scenario
     Pretend you are trying to go on a hike to Mount Pilchuck, and need to find
     where to drive and park your car, as well as find what time is best to
     schedule your hike to avoid a full parking lot.
               Gauge for Completion The task is complete when the user has
               successfully reached the “Busiest Hours” graphic detailing the parking
               outlook.
     Task 2 - Sharing a planned trip Task Scenario Pretend that you want to
       send this location to your friend.
                Gauge for Completion The task is complete when the user has
                successfully sent the message and received a reply from their friend.
       Task 3 - Paying after arrival Task Scenario
                Gauge for Completion The task is complete when the user has
                successfully reached the “Enter Manually” page
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‍User Testing Takeaways:
                1. Map screen has unintuitive icons/buttons.
                2. Some mediate frames are missing - creates false mental model.
                3. It would be helpful to show parking density information as soon as
                possible.

‍Changes We Made
HIGH FIDELITY
Overview of key affordances of our mobile application Parking Buddy.
GROUP REFLECTION
This quarter we were presented with many challenges especially with the class being remote. Due to remote classes, this often presented challenges when finding a time to meet and also understanding our problem scope. During the research phase, because our user research centered around the people around us, this limited the design considerations to address when designing for different groups. In the future, during the user research phase, we would interview more than 4 people to truly understand our problem space and pain points users face. Additionally, with remote classes and as the deliverables advanced, not having the environment to brainstorm/whiteboard our thinking often led to miscommunication regarding design changes and implementations to make on our prototype.
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If we had more time, we would have allocated more time toward user research and the design phase. The purpose of this would be to see where the gaps are within our problem space. We realized that as we were designing our storyboard samples and lo-fi prototype, the feasibility, desirability, and viability could have been considered more deeply as many similar products already exist.

The most surprising thing about this project was seeing how we were all able to think about integrations of our app features to existing map platforms like Google and Apple maps could be helpful for drivers in the future especially for drivers living around large cities. There was a lot of overlap between our application and existing applications so brainstorming the potential of how they could merge was an interesting experience especially when thinking about how these existing applications will continue to change as time passes.

As a team, collaboration remotely was no easy feat. We found it challenging to balance time zone differences, limited schedule availabilities, and difficulty evenly allocating the work to do for each deliverable. However, with a central communication platform and the time provided in-class, this helped us structure how we desired to complete each phase of the project.

Overall, our team enjoyed having the opportunity to experience the entire user-centered design process while utilizing the knowledge provided to us in class. It was a good way to also be exposed and practice using tools like Miroboard and Figma. The project had an intensive timeline but this allowed us to practice optimizing our time and deepen our project management skills.
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