Project Overview
During my senior year at SMU, I had the opportunity to take a special topics class named Interactive Product Design. Little did I know this would be my favorite undergrad class and the start of my UX journey. For our semester project, we were tasked to find a problem and design an app as a solution with a tutorial and 2 different user flows. I was a student commuter and finding parking was a frustrating task not only for myself but for my classmates as well. That is when SMU Parking was born - an app to facilitate and manage parking at SMU.
The Problem
There are more cars (parking pass holders) than there are parking spaces. Meaning that, more passes are sold than there are spaces. This causes students/faculty to search for a parking spot for extended periods – making them late to their classes.
Role
UX Researcher & UX Designer (September 2019 - December 2019)
Responsibilities
- Led user interviews, usability testing, product design, and prototyping
- Created style guide and component library
- Iterated on designs based on user feedback
Users
The target users are faculty, visitors, commuters, and residents. Faculty have blue parking passes, residents have gold, commuters have red, and visitors don’t have a color but I have assigned a teal color to identify these users.
User Research Summary
- After interviewing a few student commuters, residents, and guests, I quickly found that most of them arrived to campus at least an hour before their first class/event to find a parking spot.
- Some of the residents did not like moving their car or they would lose their parking spot.
- The users wanted a way to see how many parking spots were available at their favorite parking garage and notifications of when the lot was almost full.
- They also wanted a way to manage their parking account - renewing their parking pass, updating/adding car information, and even inputting their schedule to get suggested leaving times.
Initial Designs
These are some of my very first designs and ideas - I wanted to ensure that users wouldn’t get distracted while driving so the app would always ask if the user is driving. Then, on the first use, the user would login or set up their account information: they would input their name, schedule, and notification preferences.
Usability Testing
- Visitors expressed slight confusion at the campus map - they also wanted the ability to pay for parking within the app.
- A user said they had a toll tag that they would like to manage within the app (since those with a toll tag use it instead of having a parking pass).
- There was a strong desire to have a live updated map but due to the constraint of designs and prototypes, they had to imagine that part.
- The screen that asks for their name was a bit redundant (fourth one above) and they wanted a separate notification option to be reminded to renew their parking pass.
Final Designs
- Since this app is meant to be used by SMU students/faculty, I tried to keep the design consistent with that of SMU so, I referred to the SMU style guide for this.
- I did add fun little icons and pictures so there wasn’t so much white space or text – plus if you’re looking for parking, it shouldn’t be so boring right?
- I did not want users to feel overwhelmed by the information they are seeing, so I tried to make the visuals as welcoming and appealing as I could.
Final Prototype
Feel free to interact with the prototype here - if you click on the screen, clickable regions will blink/highlight in blue; you can explore the app as a commuter to see all of the features or start with the visitor flow to get a sense of how it works.
Product Successes
- SMU Parking was made to help SMU parking pass holders plan their drive to campus and find a parking spot as smoothly as possible.
- Users are able to input their schedules into the app and receive notifications once their preferred parking lot is filling up.
- Users can also manage their pass, add cars, add a Toll Tag – all within the app.
- A user can see upcoming events and be notified about them to plan their drive around them and bigger traffic. They can also see fun facts about parking under the Metrics page.
- And finally, they can give feedback for new features or any concerns they have with existing ones.
Next Steps
Parking seems to be an issue almost (if not) everywhere so we could probably leverage this existing solution and just replace the SMU Parking logo with the school/institution/company logo and give people one less headache about parking. Of course this would require ID scanners or some sort of tracking to know how many spots are open, but it would greatly help everyone plan their schedules when stepping out and ensure they have parking 🥳
