Senior Product Manager
NaviBuddy
2021 Case Study
NaviBuddy is a mobile app that provides real-time parking availability to enhance parking experiences everywhere.
This project consisted of creating a product to solve an existing problem. The design process of this project consisted of doing User Research, UX Design, and Usability Testing to create a high fidelity prototype of an app. NaviBuddy was created by a team of four UX researchers and designers.
My Contributions
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Competitor Analysis
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User Interviews
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Empathy Maps
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Stakeholder Map
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User Personas
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User Stories
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Current and Future State Journey Maps
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Lean Product Canvas
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Lo-Fi sketching
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Workflows
Research
Understanding the opportunity, customers, and competition
Market Scan
The market for developing mobile parking apps has grown over the past few years. Our team performed several types of UX inspections on our competitors to determine design gaps and opportunities including consistency inspections, VIMM load factors, heuristic inspections, and customer reviews.
Key Findings
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Hierarchical typography
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Well-placed CTAs
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Outdated parking maps
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Mismatched pricing
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Confusing navigation patterns
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Poor color contrasts
Feature-Based Inspection
Most parking apps focus only on paying for parking once the traveler has arrived to their spot. They fail to provide an app that can navigate a traveler directly to available parking near the destination of their choosing.
Key Findings
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Competitor gaps include:
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Accessibility Navigation
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Real-Time Parking Availability
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Design Research
Through secondary research, our team was able to determine the financial, mental, and geographical strain that parking causing across America.
Sources:
Key Findings
User Research
Our team interviewed 12 different driver from various social, economical, and physical backgrounds to determine their current parking experience and identify major pain points. From this data, we developed user personas, stakeholder maps, and empathy maps.
User Empathy Maps
Key Stakeholder Map
Key Findings
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Users feel frustrated and stressed when finding parking
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Users use work arounds to find convenient parking
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Users spend excessive amount of time searching for available parking
Key Findings
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The opportunity to strengthen users and 3rd party parking vendors allows increased parking accessibility
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The strong connection between users and event venues allows for the opportunity--through an accessible parking experience--to create continued engagement.
User Personas
Key Findings
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Existing parking apps fail during crucial stages of the parking journey and do not provide accurate information.
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New or complex infrastructure makes navigation frustrating and time-consuming.
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Excessive and poorly marked lots and zones make parking complex and confusing.
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Stress from parking can lead to cancellation or delay of plans in additional to setting a negative tone for the associated event.
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Navigation to event is an added challenge for users with disabilities.
UX Design
Explore ideas based on research for meaningful design solutions
User Journey Map
With the insights from our interviews, we mapped the current state journey map to identify pain points during the parking experience.
Key Findings
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Drivers experience two major pain points in the parking journey:
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"Search": finding available parking upon arrival ​
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"Navigate": accessible pathways to destination from parking spot
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Drivers also experienced a minor pain point of finding their vehicles in the "return" stage​
User Epics and Stories
After brainstorming solutions through big idea vignettes and determining solutions that were differentiators, our team created user epics based on the design drivers from our user research. We then broke those down into small user stories.
Real Time Parking
Find My Car
Key Features
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Real-time parking availability to know where you can park
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Accessibility navigation for people with disabilities
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Directions to and from destination, including ramp access
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Reserve your parking spot before you arrive
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Pin the location of your car, so you know where to find it
Storyboard
We created five storyboards to visualize our NaviBuddy's key features from our user epics. Then we sketched our UI screens, refined them, and built an interactive prototype to show to potential customers.
Scenario: Oliver needs to find available parking to see a show.
Real Time Parking
NaviBuddy's key features used in the scenario
Sketches and Workflows
We created over 80 sketches of potential workflows for our key features and refined them as we received feedback from our users.
Enter
Destination
Real-Time Parking
Select Parking Spot
Pay for Parking
Navigate to Event
Enter
Destination
Prototyping
Once our sketches were refined and validated, our team created wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes to validate with our potential users. We developed 20 individual pages, 79 interactions and 4 discrete workflows.
Usability Testing
We performed a series of usability testing methods to get critical feedback from our customers to improve our design.
Scenarios
After performing blink-tests and initial impressions, we presented a scenario to our users to validate the UI experience and workflows.
Scenarios
You are attending a show at the Winspear Opera House on a rainy Friday evening. You need to find covered parking close to the venue, and you do not want to pay extra for valet.
Tasks:
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Find parking as close as possible to the Winspear Opera House
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Pay for $5 parking in spot H2 from 7PM-9PM.
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Navigate to Winspear Opera House from your parking spot.
System Usability Scale (SUS)
Our 8 usability tests gave us a SUS score of 85.5 which gives our app an A grade. This score is just directional, as for a proper score we needed 11-14 users to complete tests. Nonetheless, it does show that our app is useable and people would recommend it to their friends.
Post-Usability Survey Feedback
Overall, usability tests showed that our app was positively received. User comments reflect enthusiasm for users pinning their cars, navigating their pathways, and filtering their search. Our potential users also enjoyed the visual presentation of the app.
Lean Product Canvas
For our Marketplace Positioning we looked at how to position Navi Buddy in the market and measure our success.
Unique Value Proposition
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Real-time parking availability
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Mobile pin to locate your car anywhere
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Accessible paths to your destination
Revenue Streams
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Parking space commissions
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B2B Sales
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Advertisements
Key Metrics
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Downloads of NaviBuddy
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Number of monthly subscriptions
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Revenue generated on ads and paid parking
Next Steps
Our plan for how to take our project to the next level and build a more comprehensive user experience includes rentable parking spaces, B2B packages, and predictive modeling.
