Helping car-parkers in Seattle get fewer tickets
Design problem: How can we help people who park cars in Seattle know whether they're parking spot is currently legal (and for how long)? As newbies to Seattle, we noticed how hard it sometimes is just to understand the signage and wanted to help. My role: We worked as a highly collaborative team. I performed usability testing, contributed to concepting, designed some screens of the application, and built the prototype in Prototype on Paper. Process: Our research methods included a competitive analysis of seven similar parking-related applications, 1-hr observations of the three most ticketed locations in Seattle, and a survey of 45 individuals. From our research we created two primary personas (Carrie the Yuppie & Laura the Soccer Mom) and one secondary persona, John the Tourist. From there we began our design phase by sketching, and eventually created high-fidelity mockups in Illustrator that we used for our prototype. We performed 3 usability tests on our prototype, iterated on our design, created a 2 minute video, and wrote up a design specification. Result: Our final prototype design enables our users to quickly see whether their spot is legal, how long it is legal for, and where there are legal spots if it isn't legal on a map. Other functions include the ability to save a spot if it is somewhere the user often goes, as well as to set a timer to remind you that your meter is running out. A great next step would be to do a diary study or field test to better understand how it would be used in real-time. How many users would really save their spot? Would they use the in-app timer, or just want to use the built-in timer? These would be great questions to better understand. Check out our video to see the full concept! Team: Michael Gelon, Denise Borges Date: Fall 2013
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