CSE 440 Autumn 2008: Assignment 2 Contextual Inquiry and 1 st Interface Sketches Online URL: http://students.washington.edu/nuoyan/cse440/hw2.docx Group Manager: Jonathan McKay Designer: Linda Hong Le Usability Tester: Alireza Bagheri Garakani Writer: Nuo Yan Project: ParkSmart Problem and Solution Overview Finding parking in a congested area is stressful and often the result of pure luck. Drivers waste time and money circling a parking lot only to park a respectable distance away from their destination. With the current parking system, thousands of gallons of gasoline are wasted. To help resolve the issue of parking congestion, we propose an application that allows an iphone to aid drivers in finding vacancies by getting information from the parking lot database. The application will provide drivers with information about multiple parking lots including parking garages, park and rides, and other areas designed for parking. In these parking lots a gate or sensor would be placed at the entrance and exit to count the number of cars entering and leaving the lot. This information would then be uploaded to a database that the application would access to determine the number of vacancies available. Drivers would be able to input their destination to find suitable parking nearby or use GPS to cross-reference their location with a database to highlight available parking. By providing drivers with an efficient means to find parking we can reduce carbon emissions, relieve the stress of parking, and feed the economy while saving time and money. Contextual Inquiry Customers We interviewed and observed different potential customers using contextual inquiry. This section describes the details about three participants, the interviews, and the rationales. Participant 1: Alis Alis is an undergraduate Pre-Med Student at the University of Washington. She lives close to the University, but is required to regularly drive to work and to other locations within the U-District and downtown Seattle. Parking is difficult in U-District and downtown Seattle metropolitan areas during daytime. She has much experience in different situations in finding parking space. She expressed that parking had been a concern in the area she works in, and she felt our proposed project would be very useful. As the result, she represents our targeted audiences.
During the interview, we rode in a car with the customer to a parking garage and asked question about parking preferences, decisions, problems, and suggestions for our project. Participant 2: Windy Windy is a 21 year-old female college student who lives in Bellevue, WA. On the weekdays she is busy with classes, so she shops on Saturdays or Sundays. She has less than 6 months of driving experience. Major shopping malls are usually crowded during weekends, so it s hard to find parking spaces. Windy is a new driver, so that looking for parking space in a crowded environment may be even more difficult than for very experienced drivers. As the result, she could benefit from the convenience of our proposed project and is an ideal participant. The interview took place in the customer s car from her home in Bellevue, WA to the Bellevue Square shopping mall. During the interview, we learned the reasons she made decisions when driving to the destination and looking for a parking space. The details about the tasks and decisions are described in the results section. Participant 3: Justin Justin is a 24 year-old Informatics student at the University of Washington. He has over 8 years of driving experience. He lives in Lakes Stevens and must commute to Seattle every day. Throughout the years he has perfected a process that generally gets him to school on time. He drives down from Lake Stevens to Everett where there are an abundance of Park and Rides which have buses that go directly to the university. He then parks his truck at one of these Park and Rides and catches the bus to school. With the increase of gas prices and more people taking the bus, Park and Rides have become insanely overcrowded. We learned from Justin that during certain hours the closest Park and Ride is filled to capacity and he must look to a different Park and Ride, drive to school, or just skip class. In his case, Justin could benefit from a device that tells him how full each Park and Ride was so that he could plan his next move and therefore fits into our application s demographic. The interview was done within the participant s truck on his daily routine to school. At 10:40am Justin left his house to catch the 11:17am bus in south Everett s McCollumn Park and Ride. He arrived at the Park and Ride on 11:00am and drove through the first row of cars and immediately headed towards the furthest sections of the lot. He didn t waste time wandering through the other rows because experience had taught him that there was an extremely low percentage of finding a spot there. He finally parked on 11:05am which gave him enough time to walk across the lot to catch the bus at the other end. Contextual Inquiry Results A common practice shared by the customers was that all of them tried to drive to places where they thought might have fewer cars. They predicted the places to drive to previous experience. For unfamiliar
places, they can only search for spaces sequentially. Generally if closer places are crowded, they would like to park in the relatively farther places when parking lots were conveniently available. However, they expressed the concern of weather. For example, they don t want to get wet to walk to their destination. All of them tried to drive through the street or garage to search for spaces, instead of waiting for someone to leave. A very important factor in the whole process of finding parking space is that nobody knows exactly where to find an available space. People search for a space by intuition. For example, they commonly try to drive to where there are fewer cars, and hope it will be easier to find an available space there. Such intuition may or may not be right, and nothing is guaranteed, so they all think it will be good to have some kind of technology to assist them in finding an available parking space more easily. Besides the common practices, each of the customers we interviewed has some unique characteristics. Alis prefers parking within a parking garage to curbside. She feels that it is safer and usually more convenient when paying. As the result she likes to begin her trip with the intention of finding an available parking garage. But if only street parking is available or close to her destination, she will park there too. She feels that a device with the ability to find availability of any garage that is close to a specified destination will be very useful when driving to crowded areas. Based on her preferences, she suggests our proposed project include the following features: i. price of parking garage ii. location of parking garage iii. whether parking garage is machine operated or human supervised iv. contact information in case of emergencies or general questions regarding parking garage v. hours of operation vi. Suggest parking garages within a particular radius of destination. vii. Option to carry device outside of the vehicle in order to re-located vehicle when returning to parking garage. Ali also commented on the proposed project for the ability to define a specific route that would allow the device to suggest the best path to reach destination and find park nearby. She concerned that this feature may become redundant if a vehicle already has a GPS system. One possible improvement could be a supplemental device that could integrate with the vehicle s GPS system, and allow quick attachment/detachment and support feature vii mentioned above. Windy doesn t generally have a preference in street parking or garage. However, she prefers a garage if there is either computer or human guidance showing where to drive to guarantee a parking space. She is a less experienced driver and her only goal is to have a convenient space to park safely. She doesn t like to drive a lot without any direction. In the contextual inquiry with Windy, she drove to a parking garage which had a screen on each floor showing either open or full. It showed that the first 5 floors were full and the 6 th were open. She decided to follow the other cars and drive to the 6 th floor. Some cars went out in the middle, but she said she was going to the 6 th floor because doing so guarantees a space. She didn t want to go out to other garages nor search on other floors which were shown to be full, because she thought doing so might
take more time than going to the open level. Finally she got a free space on the 5 th floor, before reaching the open floor. She appreciated the screens in the garage showing vacancies information and liked to follow that way. Based on her experience, she suggests the proposed project should have the ability to show nearby parking availability information, so that she can directly drive to the location or garage that shown to have available spaces without blindly searching through every row in the crowded garage. But she concerns about the frequency of update of information on the proposed application. She stated that the information shown on the device must update frequent enough to prevent everybody who uses the device driving to a same place while that place is still shown as available on the device. Justin is an experienced Park and Ride user and knows exactly where the least amount of cars is located. However, on rainy days he will break his rule of parking at the other end of the lot if it means becoming less wet. During the interview we noticed that Justin took spacing into consideration because he drove a larger vehicle that would not fit into a compact spot. He suggests that our application should be able to identify the spacing between each stalls to narrow down where he can park his truck. He also suggests our proposed project should supply information on criminal activity in the lot. It is a known fact that parking in some areas of a Park and Ride have a higher probability of getting your car broken into than others. He also made some comments for a paid parking setting. He suggests that our application should be able to alert the driver when his time is about to run out and be able to calculate the total cost of parking by inputting the estimated amount of time. He would also like to know the parking garage s working hours so that his car wouldn t become stuck in the garage overnight. New and Existing Tasks Task 1- Checking a car-park All participants manually searched garages to check and see if there is an individual space open that is within the price, location, convenience, and legality requirements The most fundamental task of finding parking is determining if there are parking spaces available in a building where the driver cannot see all the spaces. Since there is nothing more frustrating than navigating an unfamiliar carpark in a futile search for a free space, drivers try to ascertain whether a given car park is full before entering. If done in person while in the car, this task often requires driving by the carpark to confirm adequate space before the driver will enter. Windy did exactly this. In our observation, she bypassed the first garage before deciding to enter the other parking garage from the farther entrance, because it seemed the first garage we saw was very crowded and possibly full. To combat this, most carparks maintain signs that will indicate to the general public if the carpark is full. Even so, signs are often hard to see and not maintained on all sides of a car park. Additionally, if a driver knows in advance that parking will be scarce it would be possible for a driver to attempt to telephone some garages to determine availability in advance. In order to find the best deal, a driver may check multiple car parks before making a choice and parking. However, many drivers will take the first
available parking garage under the assumption that pricing in a given area will be similar and avoid any further tedious searching. Task 2- Finding parking near a specified destination. While many drivers frequently use software tools to find their destination such as Alis who has a GPS, vehicle parking is an afterthought that is not accounted for when retrieving directions. This means that drivers go to the destination first. Then, they do a breadth first search to attempt to find the nearest available parking spot. For known locations, a driver might check the nearest parking garages or lots that are often open near his location, such as Justin. For drivers unfamiliar with their immediate streets and parking opportunities, a common strategy is to drive outward in a concentric spiral until a parking. But despite efforts by the driver it is often impossible to check the best potential parking spots first. Traffic restrictions such as one way streets, specific routes and on-ramps, bridges and congestion all contribute to encouraging a driver towards parking spaces that may not be optimal. Also, without a clear destination, drivers may have difficulty navigating complex cityscapes. Usually, the first open spot that a driver passes will be taken as long as it is reasonably priced, legal, and a space that the driver is comfortable parking in. Task 3- Determining System-wide Availability In order to avoid parking when conditions are particularly cumbersome, many drivers forgo driving for alternate modes of transportation at times when they feel the costs of vehicle transportation outweigh the benefits. Justin usually commutes to school, because the availability of parking spaces in the U- district is unpredictable. He won t know the general parking availability until actually getting to the destination. The difficult part is accurately determining overall availability of parking in advance. There are some cases where past driver experience is adequate information. For example, parking in the U- district will be very difficult during Husky football matches, but will be relatively free late at night during summer quarter. However, when a driver does not personally know enough information he will often call a friend or relative who may know more. For drivers totally unfamiliar with their destination, usually determining parking availability requires actually driving to the location, by which point it is too late to make a decision. Therefore, while everyone made an attempt to get parking availability in advance, nobody was able to ascertain information accurately.
Rough Interface Sketches