Today was my first day of UX design at General Assembly. It’s been a great experience so far, pun completely intended.
We had the opportunity to introduce each other by creating our own trading cards that included a sketch of ourselves and a bit of information. It was great to meet so many people with such different backgrounds but the same interests and goals.
For the first class activity, we conducted interviews with each other based on the topic of our favorite dilemma in L.A., finding parking.
We interviewed two other classmates and asked them about their experience with searching for parking in L.A. and what their pain points were.
Some pain points included:
- difficult to read signs
- high prices
- confusing restrictions for street parking
- safety
- convenience
After we gathered our information, we teamed up with a couple different people to cross-check our results and found some similarities as well as a few differences in the responses that we collected. Between the three members of our group, we would have had potentially interviewed 6 different people which would have given us a pretty good general idea of the thoughts of parking in L.A. This gave us enough information to start identifying the key goals that we should develop solutions for.
So we got to brainstorming. We discussed the possible solutions that addressed the pain points that we discovered together. We decided to stick with a few of the main concerns we found to be the most important, convenience, safety, and price.
We decided to pitch the idea of a plug-in for an existing mapping application such as google maps or even yelp, so that we could piggy-back off their databases. We figured the next natural step for most people after they find where they want to go is finding out how to get there and where to park.
So how our solution would work would be very similar to the view filters in google maps. Just like how you can chose to see live traffic, nearest gas station, and nearby ATM machines, the user can opt to see all the parking lots available on the map. The user would be given the ability to pick and choose their desired features of the parking lots by the locations they decide to navigate to.
Within the settings of the plug-in, they can set their own preferences of price. We implemented a sliding gauge to help the application filter out parking lots that are outside of the desired price range. Also, as part of the preferences, we allow the user to chose what conveniences they’d like to see at the parking lot. Such items like, a guard on duty and perimeter fencing could add to the level safety concerns a user might have. They can also find parking lots that accept credit card as a form of payment to help them decide.
