Keywords

1 Introduction

The problem of finding a good parking place in a big city, like Mexico City, really matters. In a study conducted by IBM in 2011 [1], it was found that 73% of the drivers in this city have been frustrated enough that they gave up looking and drive away. This survey also reports that 30 percent of the traffic in a city is caused by drivers searching for a parking lot, which in turn produces subsequent air pollution.

In the Valley of Mexico metropolitan areaFootnote 1, almost 6.8 millions of vehicles circulate every day [3]. The total of parking spots constructed in the city is about 6.5 million, according to IMCOFootnote 2 [4]. Most of them are private. They belong to offices, malls, restaurants, supermarkets, shops, apartment buildings and housing complexes [5]. There are 2128 public parking garage, that means, there is no place enough for each vehicle to park [6]. To make matters worse only around 50% of the parking complies with security norms and accident coverage; the others are irregular [6]. Added to this, the information about public parking contains the data of only 698 of them [7] and corresponds only to the city and not to the Valley of Mexico metropolitan area. There is also no information about the quality of parkingFootnote 3 [7].

2 Exploratory Research

In many countries, there has been a great effort to help the drivers to find a parking spot. The schemes applied are very different. Some of the apps need to be used within a functional system of parking system, like EasyPark [8], developed in Denmark and active in many European countries. This is not the case for Mexico City, as mentioned in the introduction of this paper.

There are other apps that were developed considering the scenario of this city. One of them, called Leopark [9], which shows the parking garages of an area on the map and the user can drive there by using Waze [11] or Google Maps [12] and in some places it is also possible to pay with a credit card. Arriv.io [10] is other app similar to Leopark, but it works only with associated parking lots and has a staff of valet parking that help you to park your car.

Even though these apps have many advantages and useful features, none of them allows the driver to rate the user experience of the parking garage, which is essential to bring confidence for future users. The confidence and security provided by a parking lot are key characteristics to consider when designing an app to find a parking space in Mexico City. The prototype ParkCDMX intents to build a database with information related with the driver’s experiences and the evaluations of the parking places that he has already visited. In the next section, the design process of ParkCDMX is presented.

3 Design Process of ParkCDMX

The conducted design process was based on the User Centered Design approach, which is a design method whose process is directed by information about the people who are going to make use of the product [13]. A main concept in this approach is usability, which is defined by the standard ISO 9241-11 as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use” [14]. In this project, the usability principle was the guide that allowed to determine the needs of the users, through knowing them and understanding their activities, in order to design a product that would satisfy these needs, in an iterative process of design and evaluation.

The first stage of the process is the acquisition of the user needs in form of Personas. Then a storyboard and a paper prototype were designed. This prototype was given to different users to get usability feedback. Their evaluations were translated to heuristics metrics. After that, the prototype was redesigned and implemented as a digital prototype or mockup, which in turn was tested by five different users and evaluated using the heuristics metrics again. The mockup was redesign again to obtain a final version of the app.

3.1 Research Design

During the research process, some of the common users of parking lotsFootnote 4 were observed. Then, several in-depth interviews were conducted with different parking users to learn about their context. With some users, the interview was done in a parking lot chosen by the user to observe in detail the problems of the place. Afterward, a brainstorm was conducted with some of the interviewees to find their needs. The data collected during the interviews and the brainstorm sessions was analyzed to create the Personas and the scenarios. The information was very helpful to develop a more complete representation and concrete understanding of the user. The latter describe the use that the potential user can give to the final product. Otherwise, designing without knowing the user can result in a bad product [15].

Some of the needs detected were the following:

  • To know where there are parking places.

  • To search a parking lot without stress.

  • To be sure that the parking place is secure.

  • To have an idea of the time to reach the parking place.

  • To know if the parking lot has damage insurance.

  • To pay with credit card.

  • To know where the cheapest parking lots are.

  • To know the ranking of a parking lot given from other drivers.

  • To know if there are free places in a parking lot.

  • To make a reservation.

  • To know if the parking lot has places with enough space for a large car.

  • The need of a photo of the establishment.

3.2 Personas and Scenarios

Personas and scenarios are very useful to design because they are based on the specific needs of a user or group of users [15]. For this project, three Personas and three scenarios were created; one of them is shown in Figs. 1 and 2. The first Persona, Mr. Cano, represents a successful doctor, father of two children, who doesn’t have much free time and avoids visiting museums, theaters or going to concerts because he doesn’t know if he will find a place to park. Also, he has a large car. The second Persona is a young girl, Ms. Ana García, who lives far from her job. She doesn’t like to take public transport and she prefers to use a car, although she has trouble finding where to park safely and not very expensive. The third Persona is a 53-year-old woman, Ms. Lupita, who does social work and usually parks her car in the street, but many times the places are occupied, so she loses a lot of time looking for cheap but safe parking.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

One of the Personas, Ms. Lupita, who is married with kids and needs to arrive in time to her meetings.

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Fig. 2.
figure 2

One of the Scenarios for Ms. Lupita: her typical day consists in arriving early to her meeting and having time before it starts.

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Two principles of design were chosen: (1) time and (2) visualization.

3.3 Storyboard

For the design of ParkCDMX the following point of view was important: “It is very useful at the moment of choosing a parking place to have an accurate approximation of the time needed to reach it”. With this in mind two storyboards were drawn. The storyboard is a Lo-fi prototype that focuses in the different tasks to be resolved and to communicate ideas. The user is always the central part. Figure 3 shows one of these storyboards.

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Example of Storyboard that shows a woman that is using a computer or laptop device to find the parking lot that has available places.

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The inspiration for the storyboards were some apps, like AirbnbFootnote 5 and UberFootnote 6, that use the recommendations given by the community and establish a direct connection between the user and the service provider. Another source of inspiration were colors and design concepts like minimalism design and simplicity.

Afterwards, a paper prototype was made and its usability was evaluated applying different heuristics. For Nielsen [16], a usability problem was any aspect of the user interface that could be a complication. It can be a severe, moderate or a minor problem. The author proposed ten heuristics to evaluate usability [17]. In this project, this approach was chosen because it is cheap and intuitive.

Some important findings were reported by the evaluators at this first stage of the design: (1) time was not the principal issue for the app, because it should use Waze [11] or Google Maps [12] to indicate the route to reach the parking place and (2) truthful information about a parking lot was very important in order to choose one. The last one modified the concept completely so that the new point of view to follow was: “it is very useful at the moment of choosing a parking place to have an instrument which can give truthful information about it”. Some of the proposed screen changed to bring more detailed information in the digital version of the prototype.

The evaluators had different background, young people used to do everything with a smartphone and older people with little experience use some apps like Waze or Uber.

For the digital version of the prototype only one function was implemented: the possibility to search for a parking place. This prototype was evaluated again using the heuristics approach. This time the changes were more about small modifications in some of the screens and about simplifying the design by eliminating unnecessary screens.

4 Conclusions and Future Work

In this article, we have presented the process that was followed to determine the needs of the people in terms of mobility in the City of Mexico. Until now there is no application that allows to locate available parking spaces. So, based on the findings, although that the time of arriving to a parking place is important, the principal issue for a potential user of a parking place is the price and the quality of the service. Last one can be estimated on the basis of the qualification given by other drivers. In this way, ParkCDMX can help to construct a confident database of parking places of Mexico City. This could be helpful also for visitors, tourists or simply for people who have to go from one extreme of the city to the other. Using Waze or Google Maps as the routing tools can make the calculation of the time needed to reach the destination more easily. It is important to note that it would be interesting to apply other types of heuristic evaluation, such as one that considers the cultural context [18] and one that can be applied in specific domains [19].