Enabling easy accessibility to parking without human intervention

By Anmol Kumar

With the increasing populations and personal means of transports in major metropolitan cities, parking has emerged out to be a major problem. Although many apps like parking apps (in Indian context like Park+ and Ring Go have been popular solutions to book parking slots, they are yet to be equipped with full automation and require some kind of human intervention. This case study delves to solve this by providing many parking spots from anywhere, easy and flexible booking options as well as additional features which are necessary to make a hassle-free parking experience for a user.

But what are Automated Multi-story Parking Centres? 🤔

Automated Multi-story parkings have become an upcoming solution to tackle this upto by utilising vertical real estate as compared to the traditional parking lots. Automated Multi-story parking systems, as the name suggest, park vehicles across different floors of a designated building, but the users don’t have to travel to upper storeys if they reserve a parking slot in such buildings. An automated lift is summoned on the ground floor only and the user is required to park their vehicle at that slot, followed by the vehicle then being placed on an underground or upper storey to make way for other upcoming vehicles

Problem Statement ❓

The prompt is to propose an app to help local and tourists to explore, decide, and book parking space and use it for the booked time. Since we are designing for an automated system, we need to consider that the whole experience is technology-driven without any human intervention.

Solving for user needs 💭

The main goals while solving for this solution is to make a user first experience:

Provide access to anyone at any point of time. Since we are expecting to have no human intervention, the system shall not be limited by day or night.
Saving user from possible friction or frustration by providing a smooth experience.
Using existing technology and processes like FastTag, UPI, Book Now - Pay Later, etc. to facilitate easy payments.
Reducing the friction while finding their cars while users are expecting to get to their vehicles as quickly as possible.
Provide the benefits of automated systems while not presenting an overwhelming experience to different age-groups and cohorts.

User Research

Before even laying down my personal assumptions and thoughts about a particular problem statement, I prefer to gather insights from user pain points and data. This is to avoid personal bias while solving for inclusivity and accessibility. For this particular case study, I conducted various research methods:

User interviews

I am fairly well connected with a group of people of various age groups who actually drive - from adults to elders. I recognised this as a great opportunity to conduct verbal 1:1 / telephonic interviews to get to know their viewpoint and know how they would like to book for a parking without the involvement of a single individual from start to end. These interviews were fairly important in getting to know their touch points as well as friction points.

These are following set of questions that I asked 7 individuals in total - 5 adults and 2 elderly individuals (≥ 55 years of age)