design research-

PAR-KINg

Essences Statement:

Is it hard to find parking on campus? Is it frustrating? Does it really boil your blood?For anyone who has to drive a car to commute, we all know how difficult and time-consuming it is to find an available spot to park on campus. Not only that, but sometimes it’s the reason why students and faculty are late to class.

Well, with Par-King we hope we can make life just a little easier.

Although keep in mind, there are more students being enrolled as the years go by. Keep in mind that there isn’t much space to build more parking. But that doesn’t mean we cannot find ways to make our lives easier.

With this app, we want people to have the option of viewing what is available and what is not. We will have patented infrared sensor technology that will work with the app to manage and facilitate real time space data. The sensors will have long-life batteries and low maintenance, which will allow for more efficient use. These sensors will be linked with the parking application, which will enable drivers to easily locate vacant parking spaces in no time.

Personas:

Professor Brandon the always late

Brandon, age 54, works as a full time faculty at the UW Bothell. Brandon is a happily married man with a 6-year-old son attending school in Seattle, Washington. When he is not at school he is at home grading students homework and answering student email. Brandon is a professor in the School of Business Department. He teaches accounting classes to accounting focuses majors.

Brandon’s home is located all the way in Renton, Washington. To drive here every morning it takes about one and a half hour. Majority of the time Brandon will run into traffic. Not only does Brandon run into traffic he also have to drop off his son at school every weekday. So it takes him about 2 hours in the morning to get to the UW Bothell. Brandon really likes his job because he loves the topic of accounting in business. But time management can be a problem. He feels like commuting to school and commuting back home takes too much time out of his schedule. But the most annoying part about commuting is finding parking at UW Bothell.

What Brandon find most annoying about Parking is that there are so many floors in the South-parking garage. He isn't able to tell if the parking garage is full until he circle around every single floor. Also, because Brandon is an business professor he finds organizing and scheduling everything very important. He think if he was able to find parking ahead of time before reaching the garage will be very useful in his daily life.

Jessica the overachiever

Jessica is a 20-year-old college student. She attends the UW Bothell. Jessica also has a part time job working retail at Champs Sports at Alderwoods mall. When she is not working or attending classes she is at home working on her homework. She is majoring in Community Psychology, which requires lots of hours of outside schoolwork.

Jessica lives in Everett, works at Alderwood, and attends school in Bothell. She spends a lot of time driving between all of the places. She does most of her driving in prime time and gets stuck in traffic a lot. Jessica hates being late so she is always changing her schedule around and leaving super early to assure her proper arrival time.

Jessica is an overachiever and gets straight 4.0’s in all of her classes. She only misses class if she is very ill and she is always on time to class and everywhere she goes. Jessica faces one major issue getting to class on time. This issue is parking. Jessica has to leave everywhere an hour early and sometimes even cut her work hours short to allow time for her to park on campus. It only takes her 15 minutes to get to school, but it can take her 45 minutes to park. Parking has almost caused her to be late numerous times and that terrifies her. She will drive through the entire garage and there will be no available spots. She will then drive through all of the parking lots and find that those are full as well. She ends up having to circle around and around until someone pulls out of his or her spot.

Values and motivations:

Requirements:

We’ve noticed that people at the UWB are having problems finding parking on campus, always going up and down the outside lots and trying to explore the garage in hopes of finding a small nugget of space before anyone else. Though that’s not the only tactic of parking, another frequent tactic people employ is spot camping, a tactic that involves waiting at a spot that you know will be vacant in a few minutes and taking it the moment it’s open.

Through our survey results that we have gathered from UWB the majority of people either carpool or drive to school themselves. The participants that don’t drive to campus either find that it is too hard to find parking or it is too expensive, time consuming, or that public transportation is more convenient due to not having to spend time to park. The amount of time it takes a participant to park can range anywhere between five minutes to more than thirty minutes. From the statistical information collected a participant will most likely go to find parking in one of the two parking garages. The times these participants are parking from are mostly between 11AM and 3PM, meaning it will be hardest to find parking between these two times.

What we can infer from this

1. That parking here on campus will take anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes on average

2. The spot you most likely will park in one of the garages.

3. What we want our app to do

4. It helps you locate a vacant parking space that you spend less time searching fruitlessly

5. By glancing at the screen you will be able to infer which lots are full or have space.

6. In just a few clicks we can have you set up and ready to get going.

Good Design Makes Products Useful:

Par-king gives user the ability to navigate around the application with the least click as possible.

Not only do drivers need to defeat traffic they will also have to find a place to park their cars. That also means some of the users will be using this app while they’re in the car. Par-King is a useful app that will help users avoid the extra minutes or hours finding a parking spot at school without putting their lives in danger.

Unlike our school website myuw.edu where we’re prompted to log in every time we close the browser or when we’re idle for too long. Par-king will have an option to log in to the application with a user log in and will stay logged in until user prompts it to log out.

Every aspect of par-king will give the user an easy access to every function in the application. For example, there will be a home button, a login button and a back button on every single page. With this user will not have to start all over from the beginning of the app or have to press the back button multiple times to get to thehome page.

Par-king also gives user the ability to add value to a user’s account or delete anaccount. The flexibility of par-king is designed to avoid giving more stress to the users.

Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible

Par-king has a little design as possible so that Users can concentrate on the essential aspects of the application.

The Interface of Par-king is straightforward it makes the user focus on one thing at a time. For example, if the user wants to check the available spots, he will view the bottom with green color is for the available, yellow color is for reserved and Red color is for unavailable. Unlike other applications that contains complexity and have a lot of decoration and aesthetics. Simpler aesthetics is the way to get more users. Not only Par-king is super simple but also it has all the necessary features. It will make the users easily see what they want (parking spots) without being distracted with design.

It's not loaded down with decorations. Par-king has avoided the complexity to have a better product. When having fewer elements there are on the screen, the more impactful each one is. For example, it has all the necessary bottoms to view the parking spots with a simple layout. Most importantly, Par-king aesthetics (color, font and text) is very clear and understandable. This gives the user the accessibility and the convenient. As there are many users get confused using the app while driving. However, parking will be lean and focused in the terms of aesthetics and decoration.

Storyboard:

Flow Map:

We have created a flow map of our design app that will help us in the flow of our project

Mood board:

This is an arrangement of images, materials, pieces of text. that intended to evoke or project a particular style or concept of our project.

Word Cloud:

Below is an image composed of words used in a particular text or subject, in which the size of each word indicates its frequency or importance.

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats: 

Below is a structured planning method that evaluates those four elements of our project.