Donna Miller Watts

RESEARCH CHALLENGES:  

Research in support of a re-design from the ground up, based on a comprehensive understanding of what people want in an urban parking experience, and a commuting experience.

• Question the original “combination” GreenCar Buddy app (which included ride-sharing, carbon footprint measuring, a token-based system for rewarding meeting scheduled appointments and route mapping)

• Re-design the product so that potential users understand what it offers

• Re-design for greater "friendliness" and ease-of-use

• Question the central "anonymous" premise

ROLE:  User research for total re-design of product, user interface prototyper

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES:

• One-on-one interviews

• Personas

• Cognitive walk-through with paper prototypes and interactive mobile prototypes

• Textual analysis of interview transcripts

CURRENT APPROACH: 

(1) Question the central premise of the app:  Peer-to-peer anonymous parking space sharing.  (2) Examine users experiences of  parking -  without apps:

• How do people feel about sharing parking spaces with others on one-off bases? Have they done this, informally, in their neighborhoods?

• Compare users' reactions to the rideWindow Facebook app & to the combined GreenCar Buddy/rideWindow iPhone app

• Design a new app or apps based on these findings

• Test reactions to the new app or apps via wireframes

Process:  UX Research - parking experience, research participants

The initial new research focused on individuals' parking experiences, without the use of an a mobile app or other aid.  I recruited 13 potential participants, through a combination of friends-of-friends referrals and reaching out via Craigslist. From these 13, I selected 8, eliminating those with apparent biases or scheduling conflicts.

I interviewed these 8 people, representative of a reasonable cross-section of potential users, individually, with video and audio recording support. I asked some basic questions about their specific parking experiences.

Generalizations

Familiar annoyances included lack of spaces in residential areas, complaints about unstated, but long-standing, parking "territories" in residential areas, the high costs of garages and parking lots in commercial areas, as well as the requirement to move cars at inconvenient times to comply with local parking regulations. 

A less-familiar theme that emerged was that of safety, parking's proximity to final destination in terms of safety, especially for female interviewees.

Areas of investigation, Not Specific Questions

The following list questions look at parking behaviors that came up, and that I used to organize the comments/data I got from user interviews. These were not direct questions I asked, but rather, questions that arose from the “tell me more” - style interviews I conducted.

Drill-Down: Combining GREENCAR BUDDY with RIDE SHARING EXPERIENCE

The first round of user testing revealed that many, mostly female respondents were uncomfortable with peer-to-peer anonymous parking-space sharing and ridesharing.  While their responses indicated that they appreciated the privacy issues that were addressed with the "anonymous" aspect of the app, they thought that this anonymity, (in some cases even excepting of gender), could make them easy targets for bad actors. 

I tested this key element of GreenCar Buddy with some wireframed screens of a user journey that led testers to parking-space sharing situation involving arranging an actual parking appointment anonymously, with an anonymous person.

The next journey I invited them to try was one involving  people whom they did not know personally, but who were friends of their friends, or work colleagues, LinkedIn connections, and other similar associates.  Testers appeared to react more positively to this scenario, even though the persons with whom it was suggested they make a parking appointment were not persons whom they knew directly.

Something that became clear from these interviews was that parking and riding/driving, when done with strangers, are not analogous.  The team had considered that both were closely related as transportation solutions and thus, belonged together in a single app.  However, my research revealed the following: 

• Making and keeping parking-space share appointments - via an app, or other means - is a new or, at least, uncommon behavior

• Riding and/or driving with strangers is a familiar behavior, with or without appointments, one-off or recurring

• GreenCar Buddy sought to combine too much into a single app: a new behavior with strangers and a familiar behavior that could still become risky when set up between and among strangers.

ANONYMOUS PARKING SPACE SHARING VS. RIDING WITH STRANGERS

The key insights in this round of research were that

• Ride sharing was a familiar activity, but ride sharing with anonymous strangers was potentially frightening

• Parking space sharing appointments with strangers were still potentially dangerous, but perhaps less so than riding or driving with anonymous strangers (most of our sample said they would avoid except under emergency circumstances. )

• Sharing a parking space by appointment was a novel behavior that might be hard for people to adapt or adhere to, especially with strangers, even if a system of rewards and demerits were attached to it.

• Parking share capabilities should exist in a standalone app separate from driving- and ridesharing capabilities

At this point, it became obvious that the similarities between parking-space sharing and ridesharing were not that they were both transportation related, but rather, that they were both activities that users preferred to do with people they knew or had some connection to or affiliation with, however tenuous.

From these results, the founders determined that the original multi-use, anonymous, peer-to-peer GreenCar Buddy be split into two separate mobile apps (to become GreenCar Buddy for parking and rideWindow for ride-sharing) and simplified; and that parking and riding capabilities be re-worked to involve only people with whom users had personal (even if second-hand) connections.  

There was still some residual interest in combining the two applications into one, but this combined app was shelved for future consideration, dependent on reaction to the separate apps.  

The founders requested that I create feature flows that would describe a possible simplified combination app, without a dedicated, "club" area of people with whom parkers and riders frequently share.  They also requested that one of the original features, a "potential carbon footprint reduction" calculator be added into this flow.  (Ultimately, this feature was dismissed an unnecessary gimmick until we could create it as a feature backed by solid data, not approximation.)

Solving Urban Congestion Through Social Parking

- Securing parking-space sharing by matching parking-space partners via individuals' social, work and neighborhood networks

 - Refining a pioneeering peer-to-peer green transportation capability to be inviting and quick to use

- Opening out the legacy application to offer easy connection with new parking lot and driveway parking-space opportunities

- Streamlining users' experiences of GreenCar Buddy by focusing on what research told us users really wanted in an urban parking experience.

Marketing site: https://www.greencarbuddy.com

REFRAMING THE PARKING SHARE AND RIDE SHARE EXPERIENCES

The founders decided to test a hunch they had come to from these revelations: limiting participants in parking share and ride share activities to groups of actual peers - somewhat familiar people, like a "club." 

From the answers we received from our subjects on two rounds of testing and interviews, as well as observations of their use of the paper prototypes and early versions of GreenCar Buddy, the founders decided to split GreenCar Buddy into two applications: GreenCar Buddy for parking space sharing, and a new product called rideWindow, for ride sharing and ride pooling.

GREEN CAR BUDDY STANDALONE

As parking space apps began to proliferate, new ways of arranging parking with apps came to the fore.  My competitive research revealed three additional options that could be helpful to GreenCar Buddy users.  These three options answered a use-case that could arise when absolutely no GreenCar Buddy socially networked individuals might be parking nearby.  I also saw the inclusion of these three options as a way to attract people to GreenCar Buddy right away, without their needing to add their social network connections. 

These three additional options were:

• The ability to see nearby garages --proximity and cost of parking

• The ability to see nearby parking lots--proximity and cost of parking

• The ability for people to offer their garages or driveway spaces for spot or long-term parking to GCB users, with cost and timing information

Although these options were added to the product and prototype, and they should be able to operate within the established GreenCar Buddy interaction model illustrated in the above mock-ups, they have not yet been tested with users, as the parking-share capabilities have.  The user research and testing for these options is provisionally scheduled to take place by Q1-2022

PROTOTYPING TOOLS: HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Javascript, Sketch, Photoshop; Application UI in Update 2022: UI re-design using Flutter