Park & Ride Search App
I spearheaded the design and infrastructure of a mobile app for commuters to locate open parking spaces at their nearest park and ride.
Themes
User Experience
User Research
UI Design
User Testing
Team
Myself
Tools
Marvel, Sketch,
Pen and Paper
Timeline
3 Months
INTRO
Commuters Face The Difficulty of Finding Available Park & Ride parking
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A friend of mine, Stacie, was having difficulty adjusting to her new work schedule which led to her attempting to use a park and ride, a central location where bus and train commuters can leave their cars to go into the city, at a time when there were few to no spaces available.
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“Commuting to downtown Seattle from up North can be tricky. I like to take the bus to save time and though there’s a park & ride a five minute drive from where I live, the amount of spaces available fluctuates depending on the time of the day. Typically I start work between 3-4pm which means peak hours of a mostly full garage. Though 90% of the time I get lucky, this often involves going up & down multiple levels hoping for the best. It’s time consuming and often leads to missing my preferred earlier bus.
One day I had to be at work early around noon so my typical luck of finding a couple empty spots didn’t pan out. I ended up wasting time driving back and forth between levels and ultimately I wound up just driving home to pay too much for an Uber to get to work.”
GOAL
How might we bridge the knowledge gap between commuters and park and rides?
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After discussing with users, I deduced that this app needed to be an easy way for commuters to see the empty spots around their location, they needed directions to those park and rides, and they needed to know alternatives if their regular park and ride was full.
KEY RESEARCH INSIGHTS
Not A Matter Of Availability, But Of Distribution
I wasn’t sure whether or not it was simply a lack of capacity but I researched into the King County transportation reports and found it wasn’t a lack of capacity but the distribution of parking spots was unequal across King County.
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The utilization rate was surprisingly less than anticipated, meaning there were almost 6300 parking spots sitting empty at any time.
The issue was commuters didn’t know where any of those empty parking spots were located, leading to a modified How-Might-We Statement that helped guide my design;
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How might we bridge the knowledge gap between commuters and under-utilized parking spaces at park and rides?
FOUNDATION
Checking Out the Competition
Before setting to work on anything, I performed a competitive review of other apps that sought to guide users to a nearby location of choice.
Despite each app having a different goal, they all had common themes, namely an option to see a map, location pins, and a toast/bottom sheet that displays the information on a particular location pin when pressed. These apps also had the option of creating a profile and saving a favorite location for later viewing.
Based on what I learned on the competitive review, I then created a user flow for the park and ride app with an eye towards usability on whether or not a user created a profile.
Understanding the User
To better understand Stacie’s user journey during her ordeal, I created a chart that points out her feelings and issues that arise during different stages of her commute.
Later on, usability tests helped to refine the designs from sketch to high fidelity prototypes. From these tests, the location pins were made more descriptive, wayfinding was improved, capacity color coding was introduced to give users an immediate impression of local capacity, and the base map colors were changed to match Google maps’ color themes for familiarity.
The inclusion of live updated bus information was also received well but the presentation overwhelmed users initially. This was instead made into a collapsible window that users can open and close at their convenience.
DESIGN SOLUTION
An App For The Commuter
So now there’s an app that allows commuters to either view a map or a list of nearby park and rides, see how many parking spaces are available where, and get directions to said park and rides. For this, let’s follow Stacie’s new journey.
Park & Ride Map
When Stacie first opens the app, she’s greeted with a map that displays her current location and all nearby park and rides around her. At the bottom she has the ability to view these park and rides in list form as well as viewing any saved park and rides from before.
Location Card
Stacie selects her park and ride of choice and a bottom sheet comes up to show capacity and distance. It also offers an easy way of getting directions and adding the location to her favorites list, along with a live timetable of buses coming soon.
Stacie also has a list of upcoming buses she can expand and collapse at her convenience, reducing her visual load and only showing her the most important information.
Future Steps
Given the short timespan of the project, one aspect Stacie would especially benefit from is the incorporation of a popular times timeline, similar to how Google Maps shows how busy a location is over time. This feature would also be useful for Stacie if she considers moving to a different part of the city and wants to understand other park and ride occupancy trends.
With this app, Stacie now has a much smoother user journey.
INFRASTRUCTURE RESEARCH
How Do We Connect the Physical World With the Digital?
It wasn’t enough to just design the app; I need to find ways to feed live parking data into the app itself. I initially thought of using inexpensive security cameras coupled with painted markers in each parking spot but this would require extensive coding to create software that would decide for itself whether the object sitting in a parking garage was a car or not. I therefore went out to look for existing products and examples of parking spots being counted.
While I found plenty of examples in downtown Seattle, these were parking garages that required users to stop at a gate and collect a ticket. A relatively time consuming process compared to simply driving into a park and ride.
After visiting the Microsoft campus, I discovered their parking garages were using sonic sensors from Indect. These sensors were registering empty spots and relaying them to an external source. They also had the added benefit of acting as a pathfinding beacon from a distance for drivers in the garage itself by indicating green for empty and red for occupied.
With Indect sonic sensors feeding live parking data into the app, users can have live information on parking availability at their nearest park and ride. Once they arrive at a park and ride, the sensors will act as wayfinding for users to find empty spaces from a distance.
IMPACT
Results, & Next Steps
The prototype went through a final round of user testing with glowing responses. Users expressed how easy the process was and inquired on if the app would be developed in real life. Users even expressed that they would use park and rides more regularly if they had access to the information the app was providing.
While the app hasn’t been developed, there are already examples of park and rides in the region adopting occupancy signs, albeit less sophisticated than my solution.
I really enjoyed working on this project, especially since it was a direct solution to a real life difficulty that many people experience in the city. It’s an app that I would really love to see come to life.
Feedback on the project? Want to discuss how to better gather parking data? You can find me on LinkedIn.