NaviParking — Case Story of Smart City App

How to make a city smarter? We know! Learn how we’ve helped to develop a mobile application for a growing startup that has released an iOS app to make your city life enjoyable and friendly.

The idea of a Smart City is to enhance quality and performance of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption, and to engage more effectively and actively with its citizens. We believe technology can make city life smarter and more convenient, thus we have put some effort in building an iOS app for a startup project called NaviParking which wants to change the way you drive your car in the city.

NaviParking is a mobile application which provides detailed information about free parking spaces in the biggest cities of Europe and Australia. Why? There’s strong need to improve the process of finding free parking spaces in crowded cities. Thanks to NaviParking we can maximalize usage of parking spaces. As a result, we save time, money and fuel consumption.

Below you can find whole process of completing this project described from three perspectives: project management, graphic design/UX/UI and software development.

Project Management

This project has proved that success depends on communication, commitment, and a strong willingness to learn. The Scrum Master and Product Owner have had full insight into all aspects of work, which allowed them to make dynamic decisions and to act in a agile way. We were aware of the consequences (both positive and negative) that Scrum might bring. It’s important, especially that there’s a lack of proper approach to the Scrum even among experienced IT managers.

Tasks split between Business Owner, who was in charge of managing the relationship with the Client and all the business aspects, Product Owner, who was focused on priorities and defining each next step, and the Scrum Master who took care of communication: all that has provided us with high work efficiency.

We worked in one-week sprint periods. Every finished sprint brought the functional increment of the new application being developed. Tests took place on the Client’s side on the last day of a sprint. Many times, we performed additional functional tests during the Sprint Review. On this basis, the Product Owner was allowed to prepare the Definition of Done. During the project, we faced the following problem: how to implement new functionalities as fast as possible but at the same time fix all bugs and take great care about the code quality. That caused one sprint delay of the first release. That week was spent on bug fixing, but thanks to that, the application released in AppStore is ultimately hi-quality now.

Designing, UX/UI

(performed by our sister company, Chilid)

One of the main assumptions of the project was to build an application that would create the WOW effect. NaviParking wanted to make users switch from a competitor’s app. The graphical project was executed in accordance with our inner approach. After a project workshop we performed with the Customer (during which we prepared the product vision), we constructed the application architecture and first mockups of the maps view. At that time, we also built two mood boards as proposals of two ways of graphic design. The first one was very conventional, but the other one was quite courageous — and the Client liked it. After we received positive feedback, we started to prepare graphical projects and a clickable prototype. That prototype let the Customer check and choose the best UX and UI options. In the course of the whole project, we were in close and constant contact with our Customer and we were eager to listen to the Customer’s needs.

Software Development

Shortly about the technical specification of the project and the key features of the developed application:

– An application designed for mobile devices running iOS version 8.0;

– Data downloaded and refreshed on a regular basis with the API (for the proper functioning Internet connection required);

– Available languages: Polish, English;

– The ability to log in using Google, Facebook or traditionally.

Key features:

• Finding Parking with the map view and list (along with sorting the distance and price)
• Getting the availability of parking spaces
• Finding the user’s location with GPS position
• Seeing the route and guiding to the destination
• Changing the system settings (selecting preferable language, default location, radius view)
• Seeing how the application reacts through system messages
• Creating favourite car parks
• Sending an email with the parking coordinates
• Adding a new parking lot
• Sending feedback via the smile icon
• Learning how to use the applications by a tutorial

As a result of our fruitful cooperation with the Client, we released the app that fulfills all given requirements, looks fancy and works smoothly. Just after we’ve launched app, we’ve received pretty decent review from our Customer:

“I can certainly recommend XSolve as mobile solution implementation provider. Their effective Scrum agile practice provides efficient communication, proactive solutions and quick responsiveness. As a result, a high-quality product was built within the expected timeframe” — Adam Pucher, EkinnoLab IT Director

Want to try NaviParking? Go to the AppStore or Google Play and download it for free.

Originally published at www.xsolvesoftware.com on December 21, 2015.