Design Thinking optimal interfaces

AirSpot - a mobile app that allows users to remotely find and list car parking spaced required screen prototypes for its seed funding campaign.

Challenge

Create intuitive designs for a complex and innovative service. Add interactions that are seamless and familiar to already existing apps in the market.

Objective

Design multiple prototypes that showcase the foundational pieces of a design system and the most common usage patterns inside the app. Said prototypes should visually solve our user’s goal – finding nearby secure parking spots.

Context Study

AirSpot is a brand-new service with no direct competitors. The app’s design would try users to recognize functionality features of existing apps (like Uber or Cabify) to avoid recalling information.
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This indicates that the design standards of existing services should also be met. We helped ourselves by placing our product inside a Gartner hype cycle graph.

User Pain Points

These pain points are ranked by popularity from highest (left) to lowest (right).
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The main research methods implemented in this project were surveys, user interviews, and usability testing.
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During this investigation, we wanted to gather qualitative and quantitative data to find possible design patterns that could solve our user’s problems.

Competition Analysis

The entire team developed a competition analysis with companies such as SpotHero, Parkimovil, and Sppot. We listed their strengths, weaknesses, and distinctive features to break down what made them useful and in which situations.

User Personas

Problem Statement

Users invest unnecessary amounts of time and money in bad parking lot spaces and use services that are distant, insecure, and unsafe.

The Impact-Effort Matrix

Low Fidelity Wireframes

High Fidelity Wireframes

Testing

We made a survey and implemented usability testing with twenty young adult students and office workers inside the metropolitan area that matched our persona’s profiles:

• 90% of students found interest in the app and would likely use it at least once to find nearby parking spots. 75% of office workers also found interest in the app
• 85% felt the prototype intuitive and familiar to that of already existing apps

Future Possibilities

Different groups of users liked the idea and found the interface useful but more importantly, the product’s target audience mentioned multiple times that this app can solve most of their frustrations.

A possibility for the future (based on qualitative data) is to analyze payment screens, user flows, and indexes to avoid overwhelming the users with multiple microtransactions. This led to the idea of credits inside the app (like gift cards) which could be implemented.