Parkinggo
Parking made easy.
Overview
Parkinggo is a company that provides smart parking services.
Parkinggo app serves as an online reservation service for parking spaces.
Branding Statement
Parkinggo provides smart parking services to efficient customers in a reliable environment with an effective voice, helping them feel organized and save time.
Project goals
The goal is to build easy to use booking app for parking spaces that will save users time and get them more organized and stress-free.
Business Goals
Find key features that will help users to use the app with ease and validate the idea.
ROLE
- UX
- Defining the problem
- Research
- Building Personas
- Creating User Stories and User Flows
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- UI and visuals
duration
- April – June 2019
Tools
- Pen & paper
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- Adobe XD
The Problem
Most users face these pain points every day:
- Parking spots are hard to find
- Time-consuming
- Frustration and stress
- Be late
Qualitative Interviews
I conducted different interviews to identify pain points and insights, that people have in their parking experience.
I interviewed 3 people, to understand their needs and behaviors when they are looking for a parking spot.
Demographics
- 2 male
- 1 female
- age groups between 21-33 years
Findings
During the interview and later after evaluation, I understood what are some of the key pain points that they had while looking for a parking spot.
- They would almost always go earlier just to be sure that they will find a parking spot and do not get late.
- When they arrive at the desired destination they had to spend a lot of time looking for a free parking spot and sometimes they would not even find a free spot.
These two previous steps increase their frustration and stress level.
Competition
There are a lot of competitors in this market. Some of the popular ones are: SpotHero (America), Parkable (New Zealand, Australia & China), Parku (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands), Parkalot (Poland).
All of them are based on the same business model where they partner up with different facilities to provide parking spots.
Pros
Parkinggo is designed to have its own facilities, that are more protected. Also, there is potentialy an option to partner with other facilitators, but with the option to install our own equipment that will provide security to the user.
One of the key feature is to unlock your parking spot within the app, so you know 100% that no one will park by accident on your spot.
Cons
Competitors are already established in the market and to penetrate this market would be very hard for Parkinggo.
Other Options
Potential solutions
After summarizing gathered data, it was time to find potential solutions for their problems.
To solve key problems I had to prioritize potential solutions, and here are the most important ones:
- Find nearby parking – the app will suggest you nearby parking when you enter the desired destination, or you can directly enter parking destination
- Checkout process for reserving parking
- Ability to make parking schedule in advance – if you have an appointment next week or month, you can reserve your spot on nearby parking, or if you visit gym 3 times per week, you can make a schedule for the whole month in advance
- Directions – a guided path from your location to the parking spot
- Unlock the parking spot with the app – this prevents other drivers to park on your place
- Cancel reservation
These key features help users to be more organized and stress-free.
Defining Personas
Persona 1 - Jim Rust
Demographics
Name: Jim Rust
Age: 33
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Occupation: CEO of VR tech startup
Income: $400,000/year
Status: Married, no children
About
Jim is highly organized and focused person, who value time over money.
He is passionate about his company, and he always wants to do more.
His second love is exotic cars.
Jim travels a lot all over the country, to connect with other CEO’s and make business relationships.
Whenever it’s possible he will go on a business trip in his exotic car.
Personality
- Focused
- Organized
- Passionate
- Motivated
- Optimistic
- Active
Technical ability
- Tech savvy, advanced
His needs (Goals)
- Jim wants to save time when he visits a new city with a simplified parking reservation process
- He wants his precious car to be monitored and secured while he is on a business meeting
- Jim does not want to be late for the meeting because he could not find a parking spot that day
His Problems & Pain Points
- Be late on an appointment and lose reliability
- Too much time spent looking for a parking place in a new city
- Exotic cars are expensive to repair
Solution - How do we exceed his needs?
- Save the time with scheduling your parking in advance
- Don’t get late on a business meeting
- Have a safe and secured parking spot
Persona 2 - Emma Miller
Demographics
Name: Emma Miller
Age: 28
Location: Dallas, TX
Occupation: Freelance social marketing manager
Income: $70,000/year
Status: Single mom, 1 child
About
Emma is a single mom, that works as a freelance social marketing manager.
She is all about organization and efficiency.
On her first place is a 7-year-old daughter.
Because she needs to have flexible working hours, she chose a freelance path rather than fixed full-time position.
Her daughter has some minor health problems and she has to visit a doctor once a week at the same time.
Personality
- Hardworking
- Care
- Responsible
- Social
- Active
- Optimistic
- Organized
Technical ability
- Intermediate user
Her needs (Goals)
- Care about her and daughters health
- Be on time at a doctors office
- Have flexible working hours
- Organize her time and responsibilities
HER Problems & Pain Points
- Be late at a doctors office
- Reorganize schedule
- Can’t find free parking nearby doctors office
- Get stressed
Solution - How do we exceed her needs?
- Make parking schedule for the whole month in advance
- Help her get organized
- Be stress-free
Persona 3 - Robert Smith
Demographics
Name: Robert Smith
Age: 21
Location: Greensboro, North Carolina
Occupation: Door-to-door salesperson
Income: $50,000/year
Status: Single
About
Robert is a door-to-door salesperson. He wants to build the ladder in the sales world.
He works hard every day to achieve his goals.
Robert is always in the move, visiting new areas, cities, and countries every week, sometimes even daily.
He would like to automatize his parking process as much as possible, to save some time, and organize himself more.
Personality
- Hard Working
- Responsible
- Charismatic
- Organized
- Social
- Active
Technical ability
- Regular user
His needs (Goals)
- To automatize his parking booking process
- To be able to cancel the reservation if his work schedule changes
- To be able to visit more places and people
His Problems & Pain Points
- He spends to much time on parking research because he moves a lot
- Working with people is stressful
Solution - How do we exceed his needs?
- Give him the option to have a default payment system
- Give him the option to cancel a reservation if needed and give him a refund or at least partial one
- Help him to organize his parking schedule and save him a bit of time
- Help him reduce stress level
Creating User Stories
JIM Rust
- As a user, I want to be able to find nearby parking spots and reserve them in advance
- As a user, I want to get directions from my current location to the parking location
- As a user, I want my car to be safe while I am on the meeting
EMMA MILLER
- As a user, I want to have the option to organize my parking schedule in advance for a week or a month
- As a user, I want to cancel my reservation if I have to
- As a user, I want to have secured parking spot and be stress-free
ROBERT SMITH
- As a user, I want to be able to save default payment gateway when booking parking spots
- As a user, I want to cancel my reservation if I need to
Why Robert could potentially be a wrong target user for this app?
User Flows
Wireframes
Before starting creating high fidelity designs and prototypes, I like to start with paper wireframes, because they are easy to design and not so time-consuming so you can validate your ideas very fast.
Usability Test
UI and Visuals
The app is based on Google Material Design, with minor brand related changes.
Typography
Colors
The blue color is used as a primary color. Blue is associated with stability, trust, reliability, efficiency and also produces a calming effect.
As secondary color is used orange. Orange is associated with stimulation, success and it also stimulates mental activity and action.
Icons
Graphics
Prototype
After finalizing the visual design, I made this interactive prototype that will help users get better insights and understanding of the app.
Results
I shared this interactive prototype with a few users and asked them to do a few simple tasks, like searching for a parking spot, adding favorite places, canceling a reservation, etc. Results were good, 4 / 5 users completed tasks with ease.
Learnings
Working on this project was an interesting personal and professional journey. I learned a lot from this. User experience is about trying to fulfill user needs. Here are a few important learnings:
- Work with users, listen to them and their feedback
- Validate idea first, before launching any features
- Also, have business goals in mind while solving user needs, if we manage to make the overlapping point between these two, we can make magic happen
Next Steps
- Next steps would be to start collaborating with developers and build the MVP with key features
- After launching the MVP and testing the market, we will probably need to re-evaluate the pricing strategy and target users, to see what approach would be best for ROI and future of the app
- Add new features to the app based on user feedback and business goals
Looking for someone to collaborate with, or just to say hello?
Feel free to reach me out 😀
mihajlobudo@gmail.com
