Team
Anita Daniel
Sofia Walton
Erzhen Wei
Sophia Mai (me!)
Timeline
32 weeks
Tools
FigJam
Figma
Google Forms
Overview
ParkIQ is an informational mobile application that allows users to see parking updates and availability in University District, based on data from in-ground sensors and community-crowdsourced data.
This was a six-month long project designed for a two-quarter series called HCDE 302 and HCDE 303 (Foundations of Human Centered Design).
Impact
It was my first time going through the entire design process to create a solution for our problem space!
Parking in UDistrict is Really, Really Hard
If you’ve ever been in University District, you would know how difficult it is to find parking there. As some say on Reddit, it “might be the worst place in the whole city [of Seattle] for parking.”
Some contributors to this issue include transit-oriented roads, lack of parking garages, confusing signage, and exorbitant and varying parking fees.
Although I don’t drive in University District myself, I have many friends that either drive to campus or have their car to University District, and have watched all of them circle around for at least five to ten minutes looking for parking.
ParkIQ Makes Parking Easy!
ParkIQ is a mobile application that allowing users to leave feedback and updates on parking through a community forum, as well as reference real-time parking data from in-ground sensors, making parking easy and efficient.
Competitive Analysis
While looking into existing parking apps, we noticed that almost all focus solely on showing availability for parking garages, and not public street parking.
The issue with this is that there are only handful of parking garages in University District which are usually very expensive and full, which means you have to circle around looking for street parking, unexpectedly running into road closures or not knowing what the signs mean, and therefore whether or not you can park there, or parking illegally and hoping for the best.
Interviews
“Parking is a very stressful process. I dread finding parking each time I arrive in the area.”
To reaffirm our competitive analysis and personal experiences, we interviewed 4 UW students that either commute to UDistrict or brought their car to campus to gain a better understanding of their experiences parking in UDistrict and how we could tailor our solution to address the issues they face.
User Research Findings
Finding parking in UDistrict is very frustrating, stressful, confusing, and sometimes, not safe.
All participants expressed frustration and stress while looking for parking around campus. This can be from the amount of time people spend trying to find parking, confusing signage, the limited number of parking spots available, or parallel parking.
Because of these factors, students tend to park further away from their destinations, in less-safe areas, or receive tickets, contributing to their stress while finding parking.
How might we...
Design a system that supports UW students using vehicles in the U-District by helping them find parking in a timely and efficient manner during the school year?
Ideation
Based on our user research, we learned that our solution needed to reduce the amount of time spent looking for parking in UDistrict, clarify signage and indicate whether you can park in a certain area, inform users about the safety of the area, parking restrictions, and time limits.
After brainstorming and sketching out ideas, we narrowed them down our ideas an app interface, physical technology communicating through an app (using parking data to populate the app), and notifying users.
Pivoting to a Community-Based App
At first, we wanted to combine all three ideas into one app, but we received two key pieces of feedback:
Safety concerns if people are on their phones reserving a parking spot while driving
Difficult to reinforce and make people respect the rules of a reservation system (ie. parking only for the time period they paid for, not parking in a reserved spot, not showing up for their reservation)
We attempted to address these issues in our design by collecting traffic data to estimate what time drivers arrive at their spot and assuming that the Seattle Police department parking enforcement would continue to be responsible for regulating parking.
However, as we began wire-framing our ideas, we realized our idea was becoming less feasible, and decided to shift towards a community-based approach, where users could leave updates about parking spots.
Iterations
Once we established our pivot to a community-based app, we established three key user flows:
Choosing a spot
Finding an available spot through the notifications tab
Finding past spots they've parked in
Based on feedback we received during user testing, we added an alternative parking spots page to minimize distractions instead of requiring users to repeat the process of finding a spot from the home page.
On the home page, we added clusters to more clearly show how many available parking spots there are in a certain area.
We also added an “I parked here” button and rating system to provide more crowd-sourced data to other users about the parking spot’s condition and availability.
Latest Design
Finding an Available Parking Spot
By tapping on the clusters or zooming into the map, users can narrow the map’s scope and select an available parking spot and learn important information, such as per hour price, time limits, safety, etc.
In the case that the spot becomes unavailable while the user is navigating to it, the app will send a notification and suggest other nearby parking spots.
After the user has parked in an available parking spot, users are asked if they’ve parked and to rate the spot after they’ve left.
What I Learned
More user & problem space research!
During the final week on this project, we briefly presented our final prototype and process, where we were told that by potentially spending more time on research for both the problem space and potential users, we would've been able to avoid or reduce a lot of the back-and-forth we went through during the ideation and low fidelity phases.
Figma is really cool!
I got to learn a lot more about how to use components and auto-layout during this project, and I was really able to see the power of using these features to streamline the design process!