Stage 1 - Market & Competitive Research
While competitors guide drivers to open parking, I focused on a concept to simplify posted parking rules, based on the simplicity of Google Traffic displays.
Classic example of the problem in Los Angeles
I pivoted and redesigned the product focus from parking reminders to parking with confidence.
Some research showed more than $170M in fines from LA City alone
By comparison, parking fines eclipse all other city revenue fees combined
Stage 2 - The Original App
My co-founder built the original Android app to focus on defaulting reminders & alarms based on the posted street parking rules.
Since this version of the app got no traction, I immediately redesigned the map & displays.
More importantly, he was collecting data manually by skateboarding to each sign and inputting the rules directly into the app. Needless to say, this solution did not scale.
Before
After: A step in the right direction…
Stage 3 - The Pivot
“Street Parking, Simplified.”
— Pivot tagline
To test a few hypotheses and generate some user feedback, we needed to pivot the app to leverage crowd sourced data and open up the displays to as many consumers as possible. By building a web-based display, all users, especially non-app users, could access the data from any mobile, tablet or computer.
This was a critical improvement since collecting this much data manually took several days and was stale within a few weeks (sometimes days) due to changes in the parking regulations.
We presented these key product updates at the Santa Monica New Tech showcase at CrossCampus to an incredibly positive audience of about 100 techies. The website saw over 2k new users and several hundred more in the following days.
Stage 4 - The Redesign (iOS)
With a crowd eager to signup and contribute data, we had to redesign the app to support crowd sourced image submissions and server-side rule processing to speed up data population and display.
Sketching and annotating the redesign
A few key process flows we captured digitally, most were quick sketches
AppMap quickly illustrated various views
The Future…
While I still hope to one day return to this self-funded project, for now it's on hold. In May 2014, I was hired as a Senior Designer at DIRECTV and granted permission by the CTO to continue my efforts as time permits outside of working hours.
Seer
Medical
