Interaction Design — Park By Text — Entry 1

Documents a group project for a masters in UX design in which we proposed a redesign of a parking mobile application park by text. It has since been removed from the app store. In this blog post I will outline our key findings from our user research, app analysis and competitor analysis. I will outline how these findings were distilled into personas, and how the motivations and frustrations of these personas were identified and captured.

User Research

We created a survey and distributed it online to better understand potential users of the application (survey and results). Affinity maps Allowed us to group responses that were similar and identify commonalities in peoples answers.

More than half of those surveyed had used an app to pay for parking

For example, with the question:

‘What would make your experience of parking your car better?

our affinity map helped us highlight some recurring responses:

• Cashless payments
• Real time parking availability information
• More affordable parking
• A unified app for all parking (i.e. remove need for multiple apps)

The survey also highlighted a small amount of people with specific parking needs , and pushed us to consider users that were more extreme. We hoped that catering for users with more extreme needs would bring trickle down benefits to our core user base. This lead to us creating another survey aimed specifically at drivers that had a disabled parking permit (survey & results, affinity map).

Participants with a disabled parking permit largely reported having a poor experience parking in Ireland.

This highlighted some key concerns from the user base, who largely reported having a negative experience with parking in Ireland. The participants reported that disabled spots in Ireland were

• Too scarce
• Occupied illegally
• Unsuitable
• Difficulty to find

We also observed users using the application, helping us highlight areas of uncertainty in the flow and layout. (observation reports)

Application and Competitor Analyses

In a Heuristic evaluation of the app it scored poorly on nearly every front. This gave us confidence that a redesign was worthwhile and that a simple alterations could improve the users experience dramatically.

One of the issues highlighted in our heuristic evaluation: the password field is styled like a messaging app, and only tells you the requirements after input — fails on aesthetic & minimal design, recognition above recall, consistency & standards, error prevention and probably more.

Competitor analysis revealed that some applications were doing a lot better in terms of features offered and clarity of design — search functionality especially was far superior in other apps, something we wanted to emulate.

competitors apps we analysed

Problem Identification

Based on this research we created ‘how might we’ problem statements to help focus on some core functionality and features we could add or improve to improve the UX of the app.

With a vote we narrowed it down to 5 problem statements and we thought were the most important to focus on.

by addressing these problem statements we could alleviate many of the concerns our survey participants raised with parking, and many of the issues we had identified with the application.

Personas

We created six personas but reduced it down to two, by identifying commonalities between them, and selecting the traits that best encompassed our user research results:

Mark represented our mainstream users — we tried to convey many of the concerns raised in our research in his persona to focus our designs and to help us empathise with these issues.

With Kevin we distilled the findings from our research into drivers with disabled parking permits

Tasks and Scenarios

We performed task analyses and developed scenarios and customer journeys to identify what the user was feeling while using the application, and where improvements were necessary

Using the app left mark deflated and frustrated — he was unsure of where to find parking, if he would find it at all, and if he would make it to work on time.

Using the app let Kevin feeling anxious — disabled spots can be difficult to locate and he needs to park near his destination.

To- be scenarios: we envisioned what a better user experience could look like, one that alleviated the stress and uncertainty in the as is scenarios analysed.

If mark has assurances and visibility on parking availability it will alleviate his stress, and allow him to better plan his commute.

Kevin has visibility on parking spots near him, and by reporting illegal parking feels he is helping others with similar needs.

After mapping out scenarios in which Kevin and Marks frustrations were lessened we created a plan to design the app that would deliver on this.

Read the next post here