3 Days of Pure UX : Parkaid App

Photo by Fabian Centeno on Unsplash

Meesho’s task for designing a seamless interface for their fully automated parking centers keeping in mind all the user’s needs and priorities.

Problem Statement

We are launching fully automated car parking centers in certain cities for tourists and locals. The centers are multistorey, and each floor has multiple parking spaces. People are required to book parking spaces as per their requirements and pay the charge on an hourly basis.

We would require an app to help people explore, decide, and book parking space and use them for the booked time. Since it’s a fully automated system, consider that the whole experience is technology-driven without any human intervention.

Overview

Finding space to park your car and managing such parking lots are both cumbersome and time-consuming tasks. These problems can be solved significantly with the proper use of technology. Using fully automated car parking centers uses less space, and less time and clears all the confusion and frustration of the users.

Initial Analysis

Firstly, I had to search what fully automated parking and how it functions. For that, I went on youtube and watched some videos, here’s the link to one of those videos.

An Automated parking system is where you just have to leave your car in a certain position in the parking bay and it gets automatically parked with the help of robotic cranes. At the bay, the car is scanned properly for it to be in a certain position for the operation to proceed.

Now after finding out “How it works”, my next work was analyzing how regular parking is affecting users and what are the main pain points —

For that, I interviewed some of my friends and relatives who own cars in metro cities and use them for most of their activities. These are some of the problems they have faced in parking complexes —

1. The Hustle in finding a parking lot is huge and to find the proper directions you may have to stop in traffic and ask other people.
2. Wastage of time in looking for a parking spot, especially when a parking lot is crowded.
3. Hard to memorize the parking number and locate the vehicle in a parking lot afterward. No directions are available to combat this issue.
4. Parking slips are the only proof of parking fees given, and if the slip gets misplaced, problems are waiting for you.
5. Payment methods are generally limited to Cash and there is always unavailability of change in your pockets.

User Journey (Current Situation)

Overloaded Slow Car…….

Based on the problems, I mapped out a user journey for Aman who is going to some stores for shopping. He is traveling in his car and is super excited to buy new stuff.

User Journey for the current parking system in any metro city

Understanding the user: Mapping pain points and priorities

It is clear from above that user is indeed very frustrated by the whole parking process, especially in a new place where they have to search for parking lots. Let’s now map some pain points for the same.

Pain Points 😣

1. Users don’t know whether there are parking spots available in a particular parking lot.
2. Waste of time finding a parking lot and finding a vacant spot in a particular parking lot.
3. Hard to find your car afterward, especially if you forget your spot number.
4. Paper parking tickets are easily damaged or misplaced.
5. Very few payment options, often only cash.

Priorities 🤨

1. Saving time: User waste a lot of time with the conventional method of parking so this must be resolved.
2. Better guidance: Helping users to find a particular parking lot to save their time and frustration.
3. Efficient payment methods: Often using cash will result in a dispute related to coins or pennies. This could be eradicated by using more efficient payment methods.
4. Better parking management: Automated parking will remove the hustle of finding your car in many and all the hectic procedures inside a parking lot.

Ideation of Solution

Idea…Idea…Ideaaaa…..

Now that we know what are the main pain points of users and what our Priorities are to ideate a good solution.

Basically as explained above, an Automated parking system is where you just have to leave your car in a certain position in the parking bay and it gets automatically parked. So let’s briefly discuss the priorities of designing an interface for this kind of parking system.

• Saving Time
• Entry and Exit time
• Digital payment (as there is no human intervention)
• Easy way to retrieve the car.

and many more….

Parking a vehicle is a very small task but it can have a huge impact on your other tasks so it should be simple and very quick but yet as it disappeared from the task list. I am very much interested in designing an app that makes the whole parking experience very pleasing and acceptable so I would try to ignore some big steps that could be omitted.

Questioning the problem 🤔

I thought about the problem and what we were asked to do but as I was instructed in my previous case studies, I should know what problem we have to solve and how it is affecting the users.

Here, Why would you book a parking slot? Why is it necessary to ask them to fix a time period and book a spot?

Generally, people do not have a fixed timeframe for the things that are not that important to them, comparatively, they try to fix the time frame of important stuff by compromising the time frame of the less important work. This is why asking for a time reference is not a good solution and I tend to stay consistent with what the users are familiar with.

I have made some cases and I’ll try to explain with their help why I choose to think this solution.

Option 1

Make the users select a particular floor and book a parking spot as well.

Drawbacks

This would require users to give a particular time and it sounds ideal that the person will come at the given time, but as I said, Parking is a very small task in a day for a person so they will mostly never be accurate about the timings because they tend to give more importance to some other task and hence it’ll create a fuss and inaccuracy in the booking.

Option 2

What if we don’t ask users to give us any time?

Drawbacks

Now then if a user does not provide us with any particular time and book a parking spot, it may be the case that that particular spot will remain booked for much longer than anticipated which would be bad from a business perspective.

Option 3

So then why don’t we ask users to give us a time period? (maybe fixed/ maybe flexible)

Drawbacks

What will happen if a user arrives before the time?

Also what to do in the case that the user is just a little late from his slot and the next slot is already full?

Very Bad Experience.

Option 4

Hey, What if we ask the user to give us a particular time, and then the booking will be available for the next 30 minutes, once 30 minutes pass, his/her booking will dissolve automatically.

Drawbacks

Hmm nice idea, but there is a problem as I have already stated, Parking is a very small task in one’s life so do you think it would be good for users, if they are late by 30 minutes, they have to open the app again and book a spot again? I don’t think so.

Option 5

Don’t keep any bookings and just register the vehicle when you reach the parking spot.

Yeah, this is a great idea, you know why? because the current procedure of parking a vehicle doesn’t require any booking until we reach the parking lot. That process had a lot of problems but not being able to book a spot is not one of them, if they knew which parking lot is not full.

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So in the end, I decided to make a flow that is not heavily dependent on the app, but the journey is very easy for the users.

User Journey (Parkaid)

It’s all about family XD

User Journey of the users who used the Parkaid app

As we can compare the previous user journey with this one, we find that all the pain points have vanished and this is a smooth experience but not one with a lot of attention on the whole new processes and booking details.

And this is the reason I have kept Directions rather than Book Spots.

App Functionality 🔧

The basic idea of the app was that it can show the parking centers around a particular location and could navigate the users to that location (For the pain point that Users find it hectic to find a parking spot), and book a certain spot in that parking center, it will also take care of the payments and the period in which car is remained parked, it will also be useful when the user has to retrieve the car from the parking lot.

Basic app functionality pictorially denoted

Now that I have defined how the app will work, let’s dive into the solution and we’ll discuss the ideations and options as we go forward.

Solution 👍

The following solution is based on some features and assumptions that will not be shown on the screens—

1. The parking lot will not be full for the cards that could be seen and if a parking lot is full then its card will disappear from the home screen.
2. Location is based on the current location of the device. If the location is not on, then it will ask for turning the location on via a pop-up.
3. Users may have multiple cars, they need to go to the profile section and change their cars if needed.
4. People can search different areas where they want to visit and the app will show the results near that particular location.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture for a complete user journey to park a car

Wireframes

Home Screen

Here, I have decided to make a section for the “centers near you” which is for, as the name suggests, centers near your location. After that comes a section for featured cities (for new users) and previous bookings for those who have already used the product once. This is because people tend to book parking spots for others as well as a promotional strategy to show we are in all those cities (for featured cities) and people tend to visit the same location more than once because of any reason like work or locality or just because they like to visit there.

There is also CTA for QR Code scanning as any previous user should not have to comply with the whole process as he/she already knew the location of the Parkaid center, so they just need to visit the center and scan the QR code to register their vehicle.

There is a search bar for searching a particular location and the app will show them the result of the centers near that particular location

In the cards, I tried to give the user all the basic information that they would like to know before clicking on the card and knowing more about the parking center.

Parking Center Screen

Here, I have provided users with information about the parking center and all the little bit of things that they need to know.

And I have given the button for the user to reach the location.

Map Screen

Here, this is a basic map that navigates you from your location to the chosen center’s location. Here it’s also instructed that you have to scan the QR code on the driver’s side of the car at the entrance of the parking bay.

Also, If you have reached the location and haven’t pressed the scan button, the next screen will appear automatically but there is also a manual button as there are many GPS errors.

QR Code Scanner Screen

This is the basic QR code scanning screen which will scan any QR code with the help of the camera.

This screen can be triggered either this way or by pressing the CTA on the home screen.

Retrieve Screen & Payment confirmation

This screen shows the confirmation that the car is parked successfully, the entry time of the car into the parking center, the total time the car has been parked, hourly rates of the center, and fare till that time.

After pressing the retrieve button, the user will be moved to the payment confirmation page

The confirmation screen has 2 buttons, one to retrieve your car back from the parking center and the other to cancel the retrieving process, and as instructed, it’ll take up to 1 minute, and the user doesn't have to wait there, instead, they can proceed and pay the parking fees in that time by the next screen that is,

Payment Screen

Both of the screens show how payments can be done. At first, I thought about having payment through Fastag but then I wanted to use that 1 to 1.5 minutes of retrieving time so I gave the users more options of doing the payment at their convenience.

Confirmation Pages for Parking and Retrieving

left — parking confirmation, Right — Retrieving confirmation

Prototype

Animations and transitions could be very good compared to this but due to lack of time, this was the best I could do. Maybe better next time :p

Does my solution solve all the problems users had?

Above, there are 2 user journeys shown with 1st one being the user journey for the current parking system and 2nd one being the user journey for a user of Parkaid.

Left is the 1st user journey, and Right is 2nd user journey

We know from above and from the user journey for the current parking system what all the pain points were that are —

• Users don’t know whether parking spots are available in a particular parking lot.

Parkaid uses the technology such that only the centers that have empty parking spots will be shown on the cards and the ones which are full will not be displayed on the screen unless specifically searched.

• Waste of time finding a parking lot.

The Parkaid app gives you directions from your present location to the nearest parking center which saves you the hassle of going through all the asking and location searching.

• Finding an empty spot on the parking site

Parkaid has fully automated parking centers that make it very easy to park your car as you just have to reach the parking bay and leave your car there as instructed n the LED screen there and BOOM! your car is parked.

• Hard to find your car afterward, especially if you forget your spot number.

Parkaid has fully automated parking centers that make it very easy to park your car and retrieve it back by just pressing a button and paying your parking amount.

• Paper parking tickets are easily damaged or misplaced.

This one has definitely been solved as the receipt verification is replaced by a QR code scanner which will verify your car as well as parking and a car can only be retrieved by just a button press

• Very few payment options, often only cash.

Here at Parkaid, we are providing you with all the different digital payment options so you don’t have to worry about the change (coins) and no giving up on money as you don’t have coins (eg. if the charge is ₹18 and you gave the parking boy ₹20 but now you have to give up on that ₹2.)

Conclusion

Another fun project… I felt this was a quite realistic problem statement and quite research-intensive. A major part of the research was conducted on the internet which of course is not an authentic source if one is not experienced enough.

Talking about the process, I believe I may have been a bit more deviated toward the user’s experience in the whole process. Also while solving I worked with that one task, I chose in my mind, so the design may be a bit biased towards this one workflow, which may cause issues during the actual design and development of the product.

Also, the article is a bit heavy on text, so if you have made it this far… I appreciate your patience. Thanks for reading :)

Please leave some remarks for me to improve myself.