Parking App
UI/UX Designer
4 Week
Figma, Miro, Maze, Confluence
Homeseeker is an online portal/website where people can find safe, cost-effective housing, to their liking.
A user can engage with a product or service by using a user interface (UI), which is essentially a collection of screens, pages, visual elements (such as buttons and icons). The phrase “User Experience” refers to how a person reacts to each component.
Speaking from personal experience, wrong parking in cities in busy occurs due to lack of parking space and it takes almost 20 to 35 minutes to find them.
The endeavor to successfully tailor the experiences was driven by the intention of making people’s emotions like “ease” and “comfort” synonymous with the idea of taking their motorized vehicles out of their garages without any hesitation of loss of time finding a place to park in a safe and secure spot and make hassle-free payments at the toll gates.
Observations from the key insights were noted down on sticky notes and color-coded until it collectively gave out enough data points to articulate what we know about a particular type of user, which would affect the design decisions I took.
By having the four-quadrant, namely “Says”, “Thinks”, “Feel” and “Does”, exhibiting the different behavioral and psychographic states of the user when encountered with a given vehicular parking situation, the intentions of this exercise were to:
While elaborating on the types of users accounted for who would be using the platform, two predominant user groups had been identified during my research phase:
Here are some of the insights I gathered from my research:
of the survey participants wished the home-seeking process was less tedious and stressless
of the renters said that finding an apartment that fits their budget and needs is their biggest pain point
After coming up with a few insights based on user research, it was time to create personas. This helped in visualizing the target audience.
To guide me through the design process, I ensured this persona accurately portrayed an adult eager to find their dream home based on the parameters/needs they’ve established beforehand.
This persona was referred to throughout the entire product design life cycle to remain focused when making design decisions.
Taking the key persona (Jeromy’s) behavior, goals, needs, and motivations into account, the follow-up on the thought process was laid out in stages and against which, every interaction touch point, the user’s emotional and psychological state, and product opportunities were plotted.
After having gained an architectural understanding of the hierarchy of elements that will flow into one another, some solutions which the users could benefit from were fleshed out. A brainstorming activity like sketching out low-fidelity ideas on paper helped me to visualize multiple routes to a single solution and eased the process of zeroing down on a couple of options to execute.
While some of the users may have an idea if they used other online car parking platforms, the goal is to walk them through the first-time process (as seen above), while using easy humanizing language to communicate and drive the attention of the audience towards their first step
Taking a cue from Jakob’s Law (a defining UX law that states users prefer your product to work the same way as all the other sites they already know), I have mimicked a similar search destination interaction, while maintaining the design language created for this app
Important filters like arriving time, duration of booking, and price range were brought to the fore (and not buried inside the filters option) to provide users control over their search and help them see the availability and exact prices get reflected dynamically
Mimicking the real-life pattern of how users are familiar with reaching the parking space and then finding the right spot to park their vehicle, I have sketched a schematic representation of an actual parking lot with the option for the user to pick and select the desired spot while avoiding the situation to make an on-spot decision after having reached the destination.
Empathy is one of the core elements of the design framework. Spend as much time as you could to understand the user’s perspective and the context in and out.
Instead of speculating possibilities in your head and jumping straight to rendering digitized screens, you have to start putting things down on paper trying and testing the smallest of brainwaves till it takes the shape of something viable and effective
There is always a tendency to get started with the solutions after hearing about the design challenges which lead to faulty design outcomes. Try to guess less and focus more on the user, and business aspects to better form the actual design challenges.
There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suf alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable.