Parking Angel

Project Vision

Parking Angel is a mobile-based on-campus service created to support efficient and effective parking experience for UW students and visitors. UW students without quarterly parking pass have suffered from the ineffective and inefficient on-campus parking management for a long time. Therefore, in this project, we tried to design a service that could tackle the information transparency, accuracy, and management issues.

Challenges

	Create reasonable and efficient parking and extension procedures.
	Solve safety issues of checking out map and finding parking lots while driving.
	Provide fair parking service for all the students and visitors.
	Support better parking management and prevent violation.

Design Strategy

Apply the user-centered design process.

At the beginning, in order to conduct this project within the given short timeframe, we proposed a high-level design strategy following human-centered design guideline, with approaches that could be adopted and milestones of each week. During the project, we also iterated the strategy along the way to align with our projcet needs.

User Studies & Project Scoping

Need supports in availability checking, parking guidance, and remote parking extension, especially for one-day pass users.

Our first step was doing empathy work to have a deeper understanding of the whole parking process, the scenarios of use, and the pain points from user and management perspective.

Through empathic observation and interviews with students and visitors, we realized that regular visitors and students without quarterly permits had to drive through a gatehouse and get assigned to a parking lot.

The most severe issues we found, including unable to know the availability, unfamiliar with scattered parking locations, assigned to wrong parking lots, and unable to extend parking time remotely.

With many findings, we created a user journey map to help clarify user tasks, pain points, and inarticulate needs in each parking step for one-day pass users. In this analysis, the inarticulated needs regarding parking and extension were taken as our focus opportunities where we committed to exploring ideal solutions in the later stages.

We also interviewed a gatehouse cashier and a parking lot threshold, and visualized the cashier workflow as below. We found that there was no systematical way to track and manage parking space, and the root causes of the existing issues were lacking information transparency, information accuracy, and sufficient management of the system.

Based on the above findings, we created storyboards and personas to present the most common scenarios, the corresponding issues user encountered, and different user behaviors within different user groups.

Among users without quarterly pass, we decided to take students with higher usage frequency as our focus in this project since they were suffering most comparing with other user groups.

Competitive Analysis

Borrow ideas of remote payment and extension by an app.

To know how other parking systems work within a very limited timeframe, we took PayByPhone as a reference. It is a parking service combining a mobile app which served public parking in Seattle and more than 10 other cities in America and Europe. We borrowed some ideas from it:

	Using mobile app with clean interface to serve remote payment and extension.
	Collecting payment and vehicle information as account information at the beginning to save user time in later steps.
	Automatically saving parking locations for retrieval and reuse.
	Providing reminders before expiration time for users to pick up their cars.

Design Decisions

Separate reservation and payment to ensure fairness and simplify reservation to ensure safety.

With the above in mind, we developed our initial concept for an ideal parking service called Parking Angel – a mobile-based service which could support parking and extension through checking availability, making reservation, payment, and extension. To ensure efficiency, safety, and fairness of the service, we made 3 important decisions:

Prioritizing Documentation & Presentation

Simplify Process

Users may reserve a spot while driving, so we condensed the reservation process into four steps: parking time selection, parking lot selection, parking spot selection, and confirm. In this way, users only need to click four times to complete a reservation.

Prioritize Extension

Considering violation problems and user desire of extending parking time without heading back to the gatehouse and the vehicle, we decided to reserve a spot until the last minute for the current user to extend the parking time, instead of releasing it.

Prevent Abuse

In order to prevent reservation abuse, we divided reservation and payment into two steps. Users can reserve a spot remotely, but the payment function will only be triggered when they arrive at the parking lot. Besides, the reservation will be automatically canceled if a user does not pay for it within 30 minutes.

Ideation & Storyboard

Serve both drivers and cashiers efficiently through the Parking Angel system.

Based on the design decision, we utilized a storyboard to present how Parking Angel could work to support an ideal parking process. Users can start with checking out availability and reserve a spot. Later, they can be navigated to the parking lot and make a payment. They can also extend parking through the app. If reservation is not suitable for users, they can directly drive to a gatehouse and get assigned. Cashiers can track and know the available spots to provide the best service for users.

Design Evaluation

Conduct usability testing with seven target users.

To collect feedback on the service and the app design, as well as better understand user habits and preferences, we conducted usability tests, interviews, and surveys with 4 students and 3 visitors.

Overall, the service addressed most of the issues in the parking and extension process, and users were highly willing to use or recommend to friends.

However, there were still some issues to be tackled. Due to the very limited timeframe, our group project ended at the evaluation stage. I felt pity that the design was not able to be refined, so several months later, I revisited our project and tried to improve the design with hi-fi prototypes based on our research findings.

Design Refinement

Modify features to align with user habits and provide their desired information right on the pages.

Below are the five key findings and the corresponding key changes I made :

Users could not remember their license nembers and expected an easier way to input, so I added on a camera feature for scanning the vehicle license plate directly.

Users cared about the distances between the available parking lots and the destinations, as well as their addresses, so I marked the information on the map for user reference.

It was hard to find a particular reserved spot in a parking lot, so I divided a parking lot into several zones for users to easier select and locate. The design could be supported by installing sensors on entrances and exits of each parking lot to check reservation and violation.

Users would adjust their reservation time based on parking fee, so I added parking fee on the confirm page for users to check out.

Notices provided in later sections was expected since users may not read them carefully at the first time, so I adjusted the design to support this need too.

Reflection

Limitation

There was a lack of chance to access more relevant stakeholders such as UW Transportation Services.

Next Step

	Evaluate the refined design.
	Test the design in real context (with real use cases and environment).

What I Learned

	Willingness to understand others and building rapport and common ground are crucial to efficient communication.
	Usability testing with paper prototypes can be helpful in collecting user feedback in an early design stage.