(OLD) iParking — Arthur Qian

Search, drive, and you’re ready to park.

INSPIRATION

Nowadays, people often feel stressful when they drive from one place to another — they are worry about where to park near the destination as well as the status of their cars while leaving. The iParking project aims to help customers to do a more accurate research, like the signs, time-of-operating, and price, of the destination and nearby parking places. More importantly, they can reserve the place where they want to park. Through this project, people are able to reduce their travel anxiety and even ease the traffic load of big cities.

MY ROLE

I am the only UIUX designr in the iParking project and I’m responsible for all the design procedures. On the research stage, I started by defining the business goal of this project and worked with lots of invited participants on the survey, side-by-side interview, and contextual inquiry. On the design side, I first collected user painpoints to create user persona, formed the journey map and information architecture. Then I drew sketches and built the wireframe. With the help of all these design methods, I designed the final mockups.

BUSSINESS GOAL

Establishing a platform for users to have an one-stop-parking experience.

RESEARCH

The real problem need to solve:

The process of parking is the real problem that need to be solved for users in this project. 20 out of 40 participants in the survy responded that they didn’t like driving because driving is very hard for them and the process of finding parking lots are really painful. Another 16 participants believed that although they did like driving, it became a different topic when they could not find place to park easily.

The Business Opportunity:

0 out of 40 participants in the survy and 0 out of 7 interviewers have ever used an app for solving parking problems, so this project is a brand new idea for everybody. Meanwhile, since the parking process is based on driving, the experience should be designed as mobile app.

Quotes by Participants:

“Is it possible to set the appointment function for the parking space on the roadside, so that it can save the time to find a parking space, and can also reduce the congestion on the roads in big cities. “

“Mood is very important. I often worry about if there is a parking space in my destination, and wonder if it is too difficult for me to park my car in. This psychological burden affects me driving to my destination significantly. “

“Although I searched the name of the destination directly every time through the navigation, not once did I just park there.”

Contextual Inquiry:

Driver information:

Name: Lori
Age: 21
Location: Upper Manhattan
Target destination: MCM Soho
Driving experience: 5 years
Navigation: Google Map

Task:

Find a driver and let the driver park the car at a commercial district in a big city. Observe the painpoints and mood shifting of the driver.

Reason for choosing:

Lori is a college student in NYC. Car is essential for him to commute to work and he’s a relatively very representative driver because although he’s young, he owns a very rich driving experience in Manhattan. He’s been driving for years but not for a living like taxi drivers. By all these special conditions, he’s a very neutral tester for the investigation and can be a good representative of most of the drivers among different ages and occupations in NYC.

Route choice and begin the test:

Average Traffic in NYC

Work day, noon — Can be nutual to represent everyday traffic.

Trace of driver’s mood shifting on road:

Body Language Details

8 times of hair scratching and 6 times of water drinking recorded while unexpected stopping happened.

Confident.

Confused.

Anxious.

Arrive in destination. Searching for parking:

Albro Parking: Not even a garage

Park Mercer: Rate was too low

SoHo Parking: Too heavy traffic

Primary Decision of Driver

Icon Parking & Soho Village LLC are two of the best choices. Need further decision.

Compare Icon Parking and Soho Village LCC:

Final Decision of Driver

The driver chose Icon Parking since it only needed $30 for 3 hours’ parking while the Soho Village LCC required $54 in total for just 2 hours.

Winner: Icon Parking

Time consuming on parking:

18 Minutes.

(From end of navigation to actual parked)

RESEARCH FINDINGS

Not many respondents have used parking apps before. That’s a good opportunity.

People urgently need a solution to help them find legal parking places easily in big cities.

People like driving but not parking.

The mood of driving is always destroyed by finding parking places.

USER PROBELM

There are three parts while people are driving from one place to another currently: driving, finding parking places, and parking the car. Users want to skip the second part so life can be much easier if there’s only two steps they need to handle: driving and parking. Therefore, the user’s real problem is, they want to get help on completing the process of finding legal parking places.