Interaction Design — Park By Text — Entry 3

Iterative Design & Design Principles

What we as a team wanted to avoid doing was to recreate the application with a shiny new coat of paint. Our heuristic evaluation did reveal that bringing the app to a place where it conforms more with user expectations and industry standard, and adopting a more minimalistic design, would alleviate many issues within the app. We wanted to bring the app further though and push ourselves to design novel functionality.

The key elements we decided to add:

• Visibility on real time space availability, and the ability to see predictions of future availability.
• Voice assistant — To enable use while driving, and to help users with low mobility.
• Personalization — so you can see spaces that are related to you and filter out those that are not.
• Reporting illegal parking.

These key issues were raised by our initial user research, with the exception of voice innovation. We decided to include that, though less motivated by our questionnaires — it is a common feature of industry leading map software and it could allow users to use the app while driving.

Success for end users is functionality, efficiency and desirability
(Kuniavsky, Goodman, 2012)

For every design we proposed we wanted to establish early on whether the application was first and foremost functional, but as well as that efficient. We felt our user research had demonstrated desirability.

We also needed to do this as early in the design process as possible to avoid wasting time on functionality that didn't meet these requirements. By starting with low fidelity prototypes we hoped to identify areas where functionality and efficiency were lacking, and iteratively refine our prototype, while keeping the time we spent on our rejected ideas to a minimum. Our initial paper prototypes.

Rather than trying to create a perfect vision from the beginning, iterative development hones in on the target, refining its focus and improving the product until it has reached its goal
(Kuniavsky, Goodman, 2012)

We iteratively improved every aspect of the app, onboarding, parking, voice assistant, etc. but in order to demonstrate the process I will focus only on the home screen.

Some of our initial paper prototypes

The primary takeaway from our homescreen paper prototyping was the information we wanted to convey. This was agreed upon after demonstrating and discussing our paper prototypes with each other. We could see there was a fine line between providing a useful level of information, and over cluttering the screen. In order to maximise efficiency of use we wanted the map homepage to convey not only information about the location of spaces (like the current app did) but also the amount of spaces, and the type of spaces (indoor, outdoor, charging available, disabled spaces available etc.). This became one of our core challenges — how to display this information in an easily readable way without cluttering the the interface. We elected to go for a higher fidelity prototype for this — so we could more accurately gauge the layout and readability a final product may have.

Many of these can be found in our map prototype file

Comparative study in examining detailed parking information using map markers.

Comparative study examining preference control.

Some iterations of our map homepage — we decided some were too cluttered, some did not create a minimalistic experience and some weren’t conveying the information as effectively as we wanted.

We iterated over many designs of every screen and component, judging them using a version of Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design adapted for UX.

1. Learnability: Make user interactions easy to learn and remember:
2. UX: Match user experience and expectations
3. Consistent design: Maintain consistency throughout the application
4. Functionality: Follow functional minimalism
5. Cognition: Reduce cognitive loads/mental pressure to understand the application
6. Engagement: Design interactively such that it keeps the user engaged.
7. User control: Allow the user to control, trust, and explore
8. Perceivability: Invite interactions through intuitions and interactive media
9. Learnability: Make user interactions easy to learn and remember
10. Error handling: Take care to prevent errors, if they occur make sure to detect and recover them.
11. Affordability: Simulate actions by taking inspiration from usual and physical world interactions.

Some notable applications:

• Make our map experience in line with industry leaders, esp. Google maps — helps with points 1, 2, 5, 9
• Provide concise instructions for new functionality in our onboarding and our voice assistant screens — point 1, 5
• chose a design system, develop a tone of voice, and define consistent iconography — point 3
• Make User Preferences easy to see, edit and understand — points 7, 8, 9

Our final prototype to bring into our testing phase was a result of all these iterations, done on the pages as a whole and on the individual components

the prototype we brought to test conveyed the information we wanted to more efficiently thanks to iterating the design and analysing what was working and what was not between each iteration.

Our final prototype was a product of a lot of research and iterative development, slowly refining the design to a point where we were happy. In order to validate it’s effectiveness though it had to be tested.

Read about our usability testing.

References

Kuniavsky, Goodman, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, 2012