Residents Parking Permits — redesigning the journey to better meet our users’ needs.
Hi, I’m Tim from Bath & North East Somerset Council and in this blog I’d like to talk about how we took the outputs from our collaborative design workshop (which James discussed in the last blog)and built a prototype ready for testing with users.
Using the sketches that were produced in the workshop we started to think about how we could make it easier for people who have just moved, or are thinking of moving, into an area with parking zones to establish whether they needed to apply for a parking permit and how many permits are currently issued against the property they are in. We had a hypotheses that most of the people coming to our site for new residents permits would be people moving into a zone so we wanted to check whether this was the case.
We put a survey up using Hotjar (see our previous blog on user research and cool tools for more on Hotjar) which was targeted at the residents permit page asking people whether they were an existing permit holder, whether they were planning to, or had just, moved to Bath or Keynsham, and which of the following features would be most useful to them: what zone am I in?, am I eligible for a permit?, I want to buy a permit, what are the rules for using permits?, I already have a permit and want to check where I can park, or something else.
Whilst we have only had a limited number of results to date, so far the majority of people have already held permits and were looking to renew them. We’re leaving the survey running for a while longer so we get enough responses to make the data more valuable; but we also built a prototype for testing with users.
The idea behind the prototype was to try and give people information more contextually and to help them know before applying whether their property was eligible for a permit. We also wanted to take information that was not particularly user friendly on the current site and present it in a way that was much more contextual for users. We also wanted to understand the journey from our new content through to the third party virtual permits system we use, MiPermit, so that we can start to make that journey as smooth and consistent as possible.
We began by looking at an eligibility checker and what types of response to that check people would receive. We identified 4 key response types and built those into the prototype, linked to a property address so that we could test it with users during our next sprint. We felt it would be important to tell people that the property was eligible but also to tell them whether they would be able to get a permit as sometimes the property might be entitled but there may be multiple people living at the address and therefore no permits available.
We are about to user test the prototype during this sprint so the next blog will have an update on what we found and whether we needed to make any changes based on that feedback. If you want to have a play with the prototype we have some dummy data in there linked to these postcodes: BA2 4LA, BA4 9AU, BS39 7SW, and BA1 4JD.
