Projects | Parking for Waze

project overview

Waze is a wayfinding app that is hoping to expand into the college campus market. Parking on a college campus adds unique needs and problems that Waze would like to address like traffic, location and capacity of parking, time limits, restrictions, and more. Purdue offers basic parking information on their website such as rules, registration, and a map, but are these truly helpful for campus drivers? For CGT 256 - Principles of UXD at Purdue University, my team and I were tasked to imagine we were helping Waze solve this issue in the college campus market.

The Problem
Students THINK there is a lack of spots within close proximity to campus which means there is a lack of spots. And it is VALID. It takes too long to find an open spot in a convenient location, so students risk getting a ticket, being late to class, or opting for online.

The Goal
The main goal of this project is to understand the needs of Purdue University drivers and design a campus parking option in the Waze app. The Waze app already has parking in its functionality, but it is limited and doesn’t meet the unique needs of campus drivers. In order to complete this project, there were various stages including — discovery and exploration, ideation and design, and prototyping and testing.

discover & explore

Before ideating and coming up with a solution for Waze, we needed to understand our representative user group and their problems. The purpose of interviewing drivers on Purdue’s campus is to gain a better understanding of our user’s needs, frustrations, behaviors, and goals. We collected information through five, semi-structured interviews. These interviews helped frame the issues of our users and inform our design decisions based upon research. After conducting interviews, we created a persona to empathize with our users.

Design Requirements:

Displays parking availability by density (red, yellow, green)
A way to patrol parking locations and state how many spots there are at a given time
Entry for users to state how available a lot is
Maps displaying where to park (lots, garages, street spots)
Information about parking time limits (A, B, C passes)
A way to estimate how long it will take someone to find parking

Ideate & Design

After researching our users, their needs, and understanding their frustrations, we want to ideate as many solutions as possible to help alleviate our user’s problems. We utilized the Crazy 8’s method of brainstorming in which we sketched roughly 25 ideas, features, or interactions. Once we each brainstormed individually, we came together as a group organized and consolidated our ideas for the best and most feasible solution.

Next, we needed to lay out a step-by-step interaction experience. We created four different user scenarios to help discover the flow of screens.

User wants to drive to campus the fastest route, and closest parking location
User navigated to parking location
User chooses a 2-hour timed parking spot rather than a lot or garage
User leave their parking location

prototype & test

To test our prototypes and iterate on our sketch designs, we conducted two sprints following Google’s sprint methodology. In the first sprint, we conducted a cognitive walkthrough to determine all interactions in a user’s task. After doing so, we could create our first click-through prototype for testing. We tested the prototype with three representatives from our user group and gained mostly positive feedback. However, some changes needed to be made for colors and branding and creating a new input for timed parking. After accounting for these changes, we tested the prototype with the same users and received very positive feedback which resulted in the following final prototype.

lessons learned

Simplicity is key. As a designer, I need to ensure I’m not designing for myself, but rather the users. We must always remember “why”. The end goal is to understand the user, their problems, and come up with a design that helps them.
Understand the process. Within a team, it can be hard to understand design direction with many differing opinions. Knowing how to work together and choose what’s best for the user should be the main focus.

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