Daily UX Challenge #3 — Parking Machine
This is a part of #DailyUX design challenge series. I write about my thought process of approaching 20 different design prompts.
Design Prompt
Who never experiences those horrible parking machines? You never know where to insert your ticket and/or your money. Hopefully, you are here to make it better!
Meet the parking machine
Ever since I moved to San Francisco, my work commute has been simplified from 1.5-hour train ride to a pleasant 30-minute walk. That means no more stress because of the long commute, including getting stuck at the parking machine.
To refresh my not-so-fond memory of a parking machine, I went to find one on my walk home and snap a photo of it. Most parking machines in San Francisco parking garages look more or less the same as this one.
Ideally, I would wait by the parking machine to observe people’s interactions with it, perhaps even interrupt and ask what confuses them. But I certainly did not want to come across as creepy. So I decided to approach this design prompt solely from my personal experience.
Paying for parking is emotion-provoking
Paying for parking should be a simple thing to do, but surprisingly it can provoke a wide range of emotions:
- confusion — when you can’t figure out where to begin, or how to insert the unpaid ticket and credit card correctly so the machine can read it;
- anxiety — when the parking machine swallowed your ticket or credit card and followed with some machine sound you don’t understand;
- frustration — when you insert your credit card into the card reader slot several times, but it still prompts the same “invalid card” error and you have no idea what you did wrong;
- embarrassment — when there are people eagerly waiting behind for their turn to pay;
- relief — when you finally see “Success!” on display, and your paid parking ticket spits out from the machine.
As we notice, there are plenty of negative emotions, a.k.a. “pain points”. And those are the opportunities for experience improvement.
Design Critique
Keeping these pain points in mind, I decided to give this parking machine a design critique— comb through the interface, identify what are the potential usability issues provoking these negative emotions, then provide recommendations how to fix them.
As I tried to be mindful of the constraints a complex parking ecosystem in the city of San Francisco might face for any change as seemingly small, I made up two assumptions o remind myself not get too carried away with my recommendations:
- We still need parking machines;
- We still need physical copies of parking tickets.
- Control and visual cues are not sequential
How many steps does it take to pay for a parking ticket? According to the instructions on the parking machine, it is as simple as “1, 2, 3”:
But if we look closer, several other things happen on the machine side during the payment process need people’s attention:
If we have an eye-tracking device where people look at the interface, the track probably would look very messy because there is no clear indication how all the steps, including the machine-involved steps, match with all the visible controls and visual cues.
Recommendations: Adding numbers to instructions can help to guide people through the steps as linear as “1, 2, 3”.
It would also be useful to place the number along with the contextual instruction close to where the action should be taken.
To enhance the visual cue, I’d like to borrow the flashing LED slot idea from ATMs —light up the relevant area around the control, indicating “take your action right here with this control”.
Emotion addressed: Confusion
2. Help messages are random
Help messages are only helpful if they are provided based on the specific stage of payment activity a person is at — again, it’s about the context.
Our human brains are incredibly sophisticated and powerful, yet they have a limited amount of processing power, a.k.a. Cognitive load. Even for a simple task like paying for parking, if too many unrelated messages randomly appear, it’s likely people would have to pause and wonder when they need to pay attention and when they can just ignore, and that deviates them from the primary task — paying for parking.
Recommendations: Make help message contextual. Prepayment notice should appear BEFORE payment instructions, and friendly reminder should appear AFTER the payment is done.
Emotions addressed: Confusion, Embarrassment
3. Parking machine swallows ticket/card
Have you ever wondered why the parking machine has to eat the parking ticket? Where did it go inside that giant metal box? How do you get it out if something goes wrong and the ticket gets stuck? What if we don’t require inserting the ticket but only touching and scanning like the Clipper card (e.g., scan a QR code)?
As for those prefer using credit cards to pay, we can again borrow an idea from ATMs— using a retractable card reader slot. People can keep an eye on their card, and retract their card to cancel the transaction without the need to punch the “Cancel” button.
People like to feel things are under control — even sometimes just the feeling of it — both recommendations can potentially reduce the anxiety people may have while waiting helplessly even just for a few seconds. In other words, it’s ok to give a certain level of control back to people.
Emotion addressed: Anxiety, Frustration
4. Multi-purposed control with unclear hints
The current card reader slot is used for both parking tickets and credit cards. Why? I can’t verify it, but my wild guess is parking machine makers probably wanted to save the cost of installing an extra card reader slot.
However, the problem is, without designated control for a ticket and for a credit card, the hints supposed to help people correctly insert ticket and card are congested together. While the illustration for inserting tickets may not necessarily be the correct way to insert credit cards, it’s likely people have to try several times to get it right.
Recommendation: Do one thing at a time — give designated controls for different purposes. By doing so, proper hints can be listed by the control and be contextual.
Emotion addressed: Confusion
5. Hard to understand the rates
The rates are in a table, but there are way too many exceptions and discounts in fine prints makes it very hard to read and understand how much is the rate.
Recommendation: I tried to borrow the idea from designer Nikki Sylianteng who redesigned the parking sign — to visualize the rates, so they are easier to understand. However, with all the complicated conditions in fine print, I wasn’t very successful at recreating the table. Here’s my best attempt:
Emotiona addressed: Confusion, Frustration
6. People have to bend down to get the change and/or receipt
I’m not an ergonomics expert, but I could empathize bending down or squatting to retrieve change and receipt is not something everybody would feel comfortable doing. Maybe it’s a little more comfortable for petite persons like me, but not so much for taller people, people with back pain or broader waistline.
Recommendation: Bring the “Change/Receipt” slot up to the similar level as other controls (e.g., Card reader slot)
Emotion addressed: Embarrassment
Final Concept
Putting all the recommendation pieces together, here is my final concept:
What I learned
I meant to finish this design prompt within an hour or two, but it took me two hours each evening for three days. I know the purpose of taking on this daily UX challenge was meant to whip together some quick solutions, but once I dived into this prompt, I realized it deserved something more thoughtful which took me three times longer than expected. There is a balance I need to find between putting it out there and crafting things I care when I feel more responsible for the impact my solutions may create.
