Parkey

What daily frustrations can we ease for people who drive consistently around Pittsburgh for their work and errands?

Parkey is an application design for a service that helps people to park more conveniently. At its core, Parkey connects individual drivers to a set of recently-installed parking meters in Pittsburgh by allowing them to find and pay for parking via mobile phone.

For better or worse, immediately after finishing our research and design, we heard that another group in Pittsburgh had just incorporated a company in the exact same space. I genuinely hope they succeed at improving the parking experience!

Process and Ideation:

Parkey spawned in a roundabout way – after initially focusing on helping individuals find activities for their down time, we realized that any potential app would mimic Yelp or Foursquare.  Because of this, we wanted to create something very functional. When driving around Pittsburgh and parking, I was frustrated by the abysmally designed meters.

The new meters:

• Require you to stand (in the rain / snow / sleet/ etc.) to enter your license plate (which many people don’t know) which can take time
• Only take quarters and credit card
• If paying with credit card they only increment in whole dollar amounts
• If paying with credit card, the transaction can be cancelled by the next user
• Your paid parking is not transferable to other areas of the city
• You cannot add more time before your first time limit is expired without paying double for the overlapping time
• You cannot find a meter with free time on it.

Parkey solves these issues by hooking into the same API which was already developed to give users control over their parking. It allows users to pay while still in the car, increment payments in continuous amounts, and even find suggested free parking areas. It complements the existing system and vastly improves the experience for smartphone users with credit cards.

We first confirmed our research hypotheses with phone and in-person interviews, and realized that we could capture an additional population segment – those people who risk not paying for short-term parking because of the time and effort required to enter in their information. We created a user model, and personas based off of our interviews. From there, we created wireframes and later hi-fi mockups.

Example Workflow – Finding Parking Quickly: