Inspiration
Nowadays, people often feel stressed when they drive from one place to another — they are worried about where to park near the destination as well as the status of their cars while leaving. The iParking project aims to help customers do more accurate research, like the signs, time of operation, and price of the destination and nearby parking places. More importantly, they can reserve the spot 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 designer in the iParking project and responsible for all the design procedures. In the research stage, I started by defining the business goal of this project. I worked with lots of invited participants on the survey, side-by-side interviews, and contextual inquiry. On the design side, I first collected user pain points to create a user persona that 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.
Business Goal
Establishing a platform for users to have a one-stop-parking experience.
A Quick Show
Design Tools
Figma, Miro, Photoshop
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Background Research
The real problem need to solve
The process of parking is the real problem that needs to be solved for users in this project. 20 out of 40 participants in the survey responded that they didn’t like driving because driving is very hard for them, and the process of finding parking lots is really painful. Another 16 participants believed that although they did like driving, it became a different topic when they could not find a place to park easily.
The Business Opportunity
This project is a brand new idea for everybody. Meanwhile, since the parking process is based on driving, the experience should be designed as a mobile app.
Quotes by Participants
Contextual Inquiry
Driver information
Task
Reason for choosing
Route choice and begin the test
Average Traffic in NYC
Workday, noon — It can be natural to represent everyday traffic.
Trace of driver’s mood shifting
Body Language Details
8 times of hair scratching and 6 times of water drinking were recorded while unexpected stopping happened.
confident -> confused -> anxious
Find a driver and let the driver park the car in a commercial district in a big city. Observe the pain points and mood shifting of the driver.
Name: Lori
Age: 21
Location: Upper Manhattan
Target destination: MCM Soho
Driving experience: 5 years
Navigation: Google Map
Lori is a college student in NYC. A car is essential for him to commute to work and he’s a relatively very representative driver because although he’s young, he has 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 of different ages and occupations in NYC.
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 of parking, while the Soho Village LCC required $54 in total for just 2 hours.
Winner: Icon Parking
Research Finding & Synthesis
Research Finding
Synthesis
User Problem
Synthesis
Persona
Synthesis
Journey Map
There are three parts to people 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 they only need to handle two steps: driving and parking. Therefore, the user’s real problem is they want to get help in completing the process of finding legal parking places.
Design
Before Workflow
After Workflow
High-level
After Workflow (final)
After analyzing the logic patterns derived from previous user surveys, I have methodically developed an app workflow, progressing from basic to advanced, and mapped it onto a thought process diagram.
Design
Information Architecture
Design
Wireframe
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Roadside Navigation & Parking Lot Navigation
Find the exact parking place. Easy and simple.
