The Journey to The Parking Spot: A Case Study
The story of my first collaborative journey on my first UX/UI project in Ironhack’s Bootcamp
OVERVIEW
As the relationship between the metropolis and rural areas is transforming, moving around the city has also witnessed a transformation over the past years.
A huge variety of alternatives is emerging in the transportation field. At the same time, the streets have become a playground for exercise.
HOW MIGHT WE organize the variety of people navigating the streets to provide a more efficient and cleaner city?
Then the journey began with a team of four to discover the problem from this statement and arrive at the best solution.
Note that this is not my first UX/UI project, but you should know this by now if you’ve read my other articles🙃.
THE TARGET AUDIENCE
My teammates and I had at first made a hypothesis at the problem statement to be about solving the pollution on the streets and the transport system of the cities that our users lived in, so we created our survey and interview questions around this opinion.
But thankfully, we also added general questions to understand our users’ pain points, motives, and behaviours, like our teachers suggested. This helped us to refine our initial hypothesis
After iterating on our collected data, we discovered that our targeted users were between ages 18 to 35, lived in cities, and mostly moved by public transportation. We further specified — using our interviews info — our users to be professionals who although need to move around the city using public transport, like to drive around taking their private car when they get the chance.
PROCESS & WHAT YOU DID
We started with a lean survey canvas on miro. We used to lean canvas to formulate our initial hypothesis. On the lean canvas, we put down what we wanted to find out about our audience, how we wanted to reach them, who we think they were and what we already knew about our problem. As I mentioned earlier, we had at first interpreted the brief to be about reducing pollution and solving any transport system in urban cities. And we used lean canvas to organize these thoughts, discover our hypothesis and create questions in the survey questionnaire to test the hypothesis.
We translated our survey questions into interview questions but unlike the survey, we ensured we understood the ‘why’ to these questions other than just one-word responses or choosing options.
After conducting our interviews, we wrote down major points on sticky notes, and then arranged similar notes into clusters. Afterwards, we voted silently on clusters we thought were challenges we should tackle using dot voting.
After voting, we decided to focus on poor transportations systems and having too many cars on the street.
The empathy map was where we made the final decision to tackle the parking space issues in cities which consequently could also be attributed to having too many cars on the street.
From understanding our users through the empathy map, we found Sara, our user persona, a sales manager who moved to a smaller city because of the pollution and crowdedness in the previous larger city where she used to live. Sara commutes with public transport a lot to encourage her small city into getting greener and because she can hardly find parking spaces when she takes her car. But she does like to drive her private car when she could.
We used the user journey map to visualize the process Sara went through to find a parking space when she visited an Indian restaurant with her friend. She went to the restaurant after a long day at work, but it took her 20 mins to find one after getting to the restaurant.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Initially, it seemed we were tilting towards pollution in the city and then solving traffic and public transportation problems based on our interpretation of the brief. But after developing the empathy map, we noticed that two of the six people we interviewed had strong negative emotions against the lack of parking spaces in their cities. Thus, this led to our final problem statement.
Here is the problem statement:
“Sara, a young Sales&Account Manager, living in a small city, likes to drive her car. She needs a way to find parking spots without losing time because her city is full of cars and it’s hard to find a free spot.”
This problem statement led to our hypothesis statement:
“We believe that locating empty parking slots for busy professionals would reduce their frustrations about commuting around their cities. We would know we are right when satisfaction about navigating around the cities improves by 8%.”
SCOPE & CONSTRAINTS
It was rough at first, we were just getting to know each other while we had to work on a task simultaneously. I had to learn to give my opinions while being polite and learning when to let go of my idea. We also had to complete this project in three weeks which was really about 12 days, 9 days — the number of times we had class — and about 3 days or so we met outside class. So we had to, in 12 days, empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This is the reason why we had to collect a survey of only 29 and interview just 6 people.
I also had the personal constraint of trying to figure out the best internet service provider to supply me with an internet connection during the class as the initial failed me 😢then I planned to simultaneously use my phone to connect to zoom just in case my laptop acts up — thanks mtn and airtel😬.
OUTCOMES & LESSONS
Because we had limited time, our solution focused on solving one user flow which is, reserving a parking spot. That is, the steps our users would take and the features they would interact with on our app in order to reserve a parking spot. We brainstormed and decided to individually come up with sketches that would include: the prices of parking spaces and their distances from our users’ current locations; the date and time of spaces reservation; the number of spaces available; the payment method; and where the space is a private or public parking space.
For the first screen, I created a page where the user can type the street they are heading towards and for how long they would be parking. After typing these, parking spaces around this street would pop up with prices so that the user can quickly compare the prices in that area. The popups are also colorcoded in green, yellow and red to show which parking space is available (green), already reserved but empty or renting period is almost over (yellow) and unavailable (red). There was also a filter button to filter the spaces by the duration which I extended on the second page.
The third page is what happens when you clicked a popup that extends to show an image, name and address of the space; the duration it opens; the number of available spots on the space; and how to pay — on this screen, it was hourly. Oh, the first and third screens were inspired by wayv app — a commercial parking space you should check out.
The fourth screen was the main page where the first button would lead you to the first screen. I didn’t develop a screen for the second button
The fifth and sixth screens were timer notifications that stay on the top of an android phone to help you avoid paying fines if your reservation time is up. However, you have an option to extend the time which would lead to the eighth screen where you extend the time
The seventh screen shows the location of your car in the parking space with the amount of time left.
This was what we came up with together. The top left was Madini’s, the bottom left was Silvia’s while the bottom right was Kelvin’s. We decided to go with Silvia’s idea since she sketched hers on a wireframe template. Then we brainstormed on modifying and working on our final presentation. Here are our final low-fi wireframes:
One notable thing I would say I learnt from this project — which I learnt from Silvia — is to not just depend on ‘direct’ similar products as inspiration but also use ‘indirect’ products as well.
And finally, below is our prototype:
ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES
We were four on the team: Silvia, Madini, Kelvin and I, and it was remote. It was a very diverse team with everyone else from different countries in Europe while I was in Africa (Nigeria precisely). We used Figma and miro which allowed us to work remotely, we also used google hangout outside class and zoom in class to collaborate.
