UX case study: Improving the User Experience of the Home parking area by design thinking.

A brief introduction about me: I’m working as a Senior process executive. I’m very fascinated with UX/UI design. After so much study and understanding, I realized that I need mentorship to grasp knowledge about UX design. One day I was scrolling through my Instagram timeline and saw the UX 2 Days workshop from Growth school so registered. It was by Mr. Anudeep Ayyagari. I was surprised by his Non-text book approach was amazing, without second thought enrolled myself in the UX mastery Bootcamp.

Overview: The first project in the Bootcamp is the Design thinking project. We are about 30 people in the camp and divided into six groups and each group has 10 members. Every member of the group was assigned one area of a house (living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and dining room). I chose the parking area as my problem statement and I need to understand the user experience of the home parking area. So, I had to find out pain points from user interviews. which helps me to get the best solutions for their problem. I already mentioned that we were divided into teams so my team members are my users. I was nervous and confused when I started doing this project, but I have learned design thinking concepts by practically implementing them. I hope you will also get some insights by reading my design thinking journey.

“Let’s get commence the design thinking journey”

What is design thinking

Design thinking is a process for solving problems by prioritizing the consumer’s needs above all else. It relies on observing, with empathy, how people interact with their environments and employs an iterative, hands-on approach to creating innovative solutions.

Empathize

Empathize is the process of understanding user problems and requirements from the user’s perspective. “If you want to build a product that is relevant to people, we need to put ourselves in their shoes. It would be best if you wrote stories from their side” I Want to know user experience and why so. the experience of using parking areas, their impressions of use, the problems the user has met with and how they have solved, and much more.

The primary objective of this phase is to engage, observe and listen to the user to understand their perspectives. For this particular project, I have chosen interviews as my research method(Semi-structured)

Interview Question

1. Where is your parking lot? (To know the distance from the house)

2. What are the points that strike in your mind when you hear about home parking?

(To know user main thoughts about parking)

3. Your parking lot area capacity? (To know how many vehicles can park in users place)

4. Do you think your parking area is located in the perfect place?

5. Problems you always face, while parking your Vehicles?

6. Any bad experience with your home parking area?

7. How many Members are sharing the space?

Define

This is the stage where I typically frame problem statements based on the observations from the Empathize stage.

● Heavy parking Area: people are unable to take vehicles easily without many moves when some other vehicles are parked beside them.

● Occupied by others: Someone parking in their parking lot before they park.

● No protection: There are no protections for vehicles from any weather conditions.

● Light Issue: Has light issues in the night times at the parking area.

● Time-consuming: It takes time to reach the parking lot.

● No free space: Porch area is occupied with vehicles and no place to relax or spend some time.

● Smooth floor: slipping user’s bike tires while parking in the parking lot.

Ideate

In the Ideation stage, I performed intense brainstorming sessions to find out all possible solutions for the problems in the Define stage.

Started thinking of all the possible solutions to my users’ problems. So here, I came up with all sorts of ideas, from absolute silly to extremely practical and easy ones.

Here’s a list of the best 3 ideas.

1. Using Floor mounts: Installing Floor mount bars will help to park easily at one place every time, so it makes it easy to take your motorcycles without disturbance/Damage to beside one.
2. Installing smart lifter: I have observed one common issue from all users is an insufficient place, everyone has more than one vehicle but has a place to keep only one. So I thought why can’t we park 2 or 3 vehicles in one parking lot. We can’t produce land but we have a chance to create space for the 2 layered smart lifters.
3. Wrapping night reflecting stickers: I feel the main concept of the parking is for safety. So that’s the reason why I picked this one, this is one of my the best ideas which help us to identify or keep an eye on vehicles in dark times.

Prototype

As per my mentor’s instruction, I need to build the prototype for one idea out of three ideas. I created a prototype of an automatic Smart lift.

Features

● This makes it possible to park 2 or 3 vehicles at one parking slot with the help of a second layer.

● It is a bit expensive but solves almost the parking space issue, and can also move to other places like when changing houses.

● It has space for extra parking for 1 car or 2 bikes.

● It is also adjustable according to the vehicle height.

Test

The next step was to get feedback from my users on the solution. The prototype was presented to the groupmates to get their feedback. This testing was conducted online with the help of Google Meet.

Here is the feedback from the users.

My idea was appreciated by all the users. They feel this is the exact solution for this problem. They had feedback on the following points.

1. The user does not find a way to take the vehicle from the top layer without touching the vehicle parked under the layer. If it is shared parking user can’t touch the vehicle parked floor.
2. There is no feature of safety cover from any weather conditions if a parking lot is in an open plot.
3. Can’t park/take out vehicles from parking in dark times on lifters.
4. There is no way to reach the second layer.
5. The color of the lifter is not vibrant, needs a highlight.
6. The user has a fear that the vehicle might come down itself in some situations due to no wheel stopper.

After receiving this feedback, I have done the required changes.

After understanding user feedback in user testing. I came up with a new version of the Smart lifter which added all these features which were missing in the previous version.

Now one person can reach the layer with the help of steps on the middle of the ramp. A light installed now even in the dark time helps to park exactly on the layer. It is completely covered with shutters from 5 sides so need not be scared of any accidental fall down of the vehicle and protected from all weather conditions. And the color of the smart lifter also changed to vibrant color which makes it highlighted.

Major takeaways from this project:

1. Interacting and Understanding users is more important than finding solutions. This is interesting.

2. With the help of this project I learned how to do research and the importance of research in any design.

3. I understand that taking feedback from the users changes the thinking process on the problem.

4. If you do research properly you’re gonna find problems that even the user doesn’t think of.

5. Understanding and finding the problems are more important than coming up with creative ideas.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

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