DURATION
April 2021 - June 2021 (10 weeks)
MY ROLE
The pandemic has caused an ambiguous shift.
Navigation Tool
1 | Our Design Challenge
Easy navigation to location
Lockdown protocols have created an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, limiting individuals' movements. Our challenge was to create a mobile application concept that helps to create a safer environment involving transportations with new regulations alternating reality.
UX Researcher & UX Designer
TEAM MEMBERS
Allen Zhou
Alejandro Strifel
Kim Tran
SKILLS LEARNED
Data analysis
Information Architecture
Conducting
0 | Context
2 | Our App Solution Highlight
An app to show parking destination.
To have a safe excursion, it is important to know the capacity and parking availability of the target destination, hence Parking Buddy.
Our solution was to create a mobile application where users are able to use key features like spot availability, navigational tools, and instant in-app payment with ease.
My teammates and I were tasked with designing a mobile app to make movement and transportation safer during the COVID-19 pandemic for our Intro to User-Centered Design class project.
As UX Researcher & UX Designer I was responsible for,
working with cross-functional teams to develop design solutions
creating user personas and journey maps to dig into user behaviors
Focus on information architecture, interaction design, and visual hierarchy to create intuitive user flows
Parking Density
Plan to park made simple
Pay for Parking
Seamless transaction
User-Centered Design Process
User Personas
We first conducted semi-structured preliminary user interviews with four individuals from prescreened age groups and backgrounds. Interviewees provided insights on their experiences when finding parking at various locations from the grocery store to local parks.
User interviews allowed us to gain more insight into the user’s goals, pains, desires, and experience with technology. Using this information, we integrated the concepts to formulate ideas for features to include in our platform to best address their needs.
We were able to categorize pain point findings into 3 statements.
3 | Research Phase
What are the pain points of drivers in highly congested parking areas?
User Journey Map
Design Requirements
Storyboard Samples
Information Architecture
The user journey map depicts the experience of one of our personas, throughout his trip to the grocery store.
The main sentiments we portrayed were confidence, anxiety, and frustration.
Using the details in our user journey map helped us ideate the design requirements in the next phase of our projects to help alleviate negative feeling levels.
Initially, the idea of a user journey map being taught in school made no sense to me as I asked, “How can you place emotions and feelings that are subjective, onto a visible medium meant to record“.
In a sense, I still do believe this, however, I now understand that this visual is more for a point of reference and being able to see the rapid changes that can happen with emotion.
I quickly mapped a rough visual sketch. Our user storyboards served to depict experiences that our two personas might have with the product that our group is designing. Illustrating this flow helps our stakeholders understand use case scenarios for our product.
From these interactions, we were able to identify some key design solutions in our application. The visual stories conveyed in our drawings shaped the decisions we chose to define in our information architecture map.
Medium Fidelity Wireframes
To have a clearer idea, I created this informational architecture maps to depict the framework of our application. This map is an organizational tool to plan the information that will appear throughout the progression of different user flows on the mobile application.
This makes the workflow of operations to easily view on an eagle eye level.
Usability Testing
High Fidelity
After individually creating a collection of low fidelity ideas, we mashed it all Into this Mid- Fidelity prototype for the remote class.
This represents an idea of user flow and what the high fidelity could look like.
Reflection
After designing frames for our low-fidelity prototype, we interviewed 4 users to evaluate the usability of our mobile application by analyzing their experience in completing 3 different tasks. Below is a snapshot of what these tasks may look like.
Task 1 - Look up a location and find an available parking lot.
Scenario - Pretend you are trying to go on a hike to Mount Pilchuck, and need to find where to drive and park your car, as well as find what time is best to schedule your hike to avoid a full parking lot.
Completion - The task is complete when the user has successfully reached the “Busiest Hours” graphic detailing the parking outlook.
Task 2 - Sharing a planned trip to a friend.
Scenario - Pretend that you want to send this location to your friend.
Completion - The task is complete when the user has successfully sent the message and received a reply from their friend.
Task 3 - Paying after arrival Task Scenario
Scenario - Pay for parking.
Completion - The task is complete when the user has
successfully reached the “Enter Manually” page.
User Testing Takeaways:
1. Map screen has unintuitive icons/buttons.
2. Some mediate frames are missing - creates false mental model.
3. Show parking density information as soon as possible.
Design
4 | Our Design
From our user interviews, we came together to share common findings and shared experiences using Lucid chart to do brief affinity mapping.
We grouped findings into categories of pain points, desires, goals, and technology familiarity respectively. From here, we were able to draft provisional personas which then iterated into polished personas using our interview data.
The personas served as visual artifacts to communicate the users’ wants and needs. The artifacts deepened our understanding of how we can design alongside our intended audience as we ideated the user journey map and design features.
From our user research phase and taking on our user research questions, we identified three main design requirements to incorporate into our mobile application:
How can we improve the experience of parking lots in the time of COVID-19?
Research Findings
The quarter presented numerous obstacles with an intensive timeline. We faced difficulties related to remote working, time zone differences, and ensuring an equitable distribution of tasks for each deliverable. The project's demanding timeline enabled us to enhance our time optimization skills and refine our project management capabilities.
In the future, we plan to interview a larger pool of participants to gain a comprehensive understanding of our problem space and the pain points users encountered incorporating a more diverse audience.
If time were less constrained, we would dedicate more resources to the user research and design phases to identify gaps within our problem space. While creating our storyboard samples and low-fidelity prototypes, we realized that the elements of feasibility, desirability, and viability required more thorough consideration.
Given the existence of similar products in the market, the overlap sparked intriguing discussions about how these applications might evolve over time.
Improvements & Iterations
The design that has been created for the parking buddy project is by no means final, but it effectively represents a snapshot of the significant progress we’ve accomplished within the time frame of this quarter. This current version serves as a valuable indicator of our development and the direction we are heading toward in refining the overall project.