Laying The Groundworks
With the Needs Analysis last week seemingly won over the class of the car-parking idea’s potential, we progressed to the next phase of the project: drafting out the requirement specifications for the product. To assist us in gathering forthright insights into user’s need and expectations of our impending solution, we gathered users (mainly drivers) for a focus group to get their open feedback and initial reactions as well as hear them discuss their preferences for our solution.
The focus group yielded a fruitful session, where we can evidently notice significant needs in the final product. The more noteworthy ones that are more central to the product UX are as follows:
- Timeliness: car-park information should be realtime and up-to-date (status, availability).
- Directions: booking procedures should be clear & succinct.
- Credibility: for booking, user must be notified and assured of the lot acquired
- Navigation: ease of browsing (organized and intuitive).
- Accessibility: alternatives way to access information (Internet & SMS).
- Speed: service should have minimal latency.
- Affordability: service should be free or of minimal cost.
Having laid the groundwork for user’s expectation in the impending solution, we then have to formalize our target users, ascertaining them as drivers who visit frequently during the packed out hours the car-parks that will be implemented in our service. Within them, we categorized two significant groups of potential users: namely the convenience seekers and price conscious, whose characteristics are pretty implicit.
Specifying The Requirements
Now we’re right on track for the serious business! Adopting a user-centric design approach in drafting the functional requirements , we track back and refer to an important document that we had done up previously, the informal list of user’s needs. From them, we formulate 3 main genres of requirements that would be definitive for our eventual product: the aesthetics, workflow and interactivity.
To be concise, aesthetically, users are hoping for a clean and visually pleasing website that has a balance of visuals and animations, yet bearing the element of simplicity. Information should also be organized and should be too cluttered up. Workflow wise, users seems to be justifiably frustrated with having to navigate deep into websites to acquire the things they want in their previous experiences. Hence, they do not hope to see this problem happen in our implementation. Clearly, they are seeking for minimal navigation effort (minimal clicks to intended service or option: we’re hoping for less than 3 levels of navigation). As a plus point, they would also hope to have different alternative modes of accessing the system. In terms of interactivity, users emphasize on design concepts of affordance and mapping. They hope to manipulate the website in a fashion that us familiar to them. They hope to receive prompt feedbacks through friendly sound and animations rather than typical error message, as well as the ability to interactively manipulate statistical information when comparing carparks. As such, we have to utilize appropriate animation & user interaction to enhance user experience.
Keeping these 3 categories in mind, they will vital in guiding us in keeping to the right track in the later stages, notably design and prototyping phases to deliver the user experience that we hope to bring out.
Emergence of Solution
One more step ahead! We’re finally ready to define our impending solution.
We hope to deliver an informational and booking system that will integrate car-park information across the various car park venues & operators. Target venues would be car-parks that are already digitally installed, such as town and CBD areas (and in future, we could expand to neighbourhood areas like AMKHub, Tampines which are digitally installed).
The product should empower drivers to plan ahead without having to be physically present in the car-park vicinity to check the status. It should also allow users place bookings effortless which, in a way, grants assurance of being able to acquire a lot, that would negates the sense of uncertainty that they previously encountered. The product would also present various alternative modes of operation – Internet & SMS so that information can be readily accessible anywhere, anytime. More importantly, the product itself should provide a definitive car park-ing experience by overturning present negative car-parking attitudes into a pleasurable and positive car-parking experience.
Staging Experience Strategies
Now, we’re lacking a very important fraction of our product specifications. What good is a UX product if it does not encompass good experience strategies? No worries, We had it all covered. Inspired by Apple, we felt it was necessary to establish dynamics that ensure the product achieves the feel that we hope the user to uniquely experience with our product. To be short and snappy, these are the more vital ones that is pivotal to our experience strategies.
- Key Differentiator
- Users’ pleasurable experience of acquiring car park lots
o without being physically present and laboriously sourcing for one - Sensorial Aspect
- An experiential approach of satisfaction
o Sense of achievement, comfort and relief
o Saving time and physical effort - Symbolic Aspect
- Novelty to date
- Combining physical car park with technology
- New experience of car-parking - Meaningful/Practicality Aspect
- Convenient and efficient one-stop driver guide and tool
- Provide timely and prompt information
- “You’ve got it” sentiment
To conclude the product specifications: ultimately, we hope to present a solution that would transform car-parking experience into a pleasurable and assuring experience.
Peer Feedbacks
As we did not bring in GPS into our presentation, questions were raised on the exclusion of GPS in our solution. We actually included GPS in our implementation, but besides the lack of time in implementing it for this module, the adoption rate of GPS also isn’t that widespread in Singapore as yet. That is why we are shelving it GPS implementation off for now, deciding to focus on the 2 channels that are already common utilized in SG (SMS & Internet). Nevertheless, it was a good point raised by as we too, foresee that GPS in Singapore will be commonplace in years to come, and an imminent GPS implementation of our system would definitely enhance the user experience of car-parking to a higher level.
(For more insights on the increase in adaptation of GPS, please refer to the article quoted in my teammate (Alvin)’s UX blog)
Reflections
Honestly speaking, I’d learnt a great deal in the preparation for the deliverables for this phase. User-centered approaches are indeed advantageous, although I felt it was rather tedious and time-consuming, as it is indeed a laborious iterative process: every week we have to get back to the users, and then analyze and evaluation findings.
As part of computing students and programmers, very often we do not seek user’s opinions in our projects. We do not understand or even bother how the things we develop will affect the users. Hence, many times in this project, I often have the tendency to sway away from seeking user opinions, thereby needing the extra effort to keep reminding myself to keep probing users. It was only till the interactions with the users, that changed my standpoints entirely. I felt that delving deep into user’s needs and requirements did gave us surprisingly new and different insights to explore, sometimes they are really useful suggestions and even perspectives that I had never and perhaps could never envision before. However, as we’re still dealing with a very small sample size of users, there might be a need for more users to participate to get a more balanced evaluation. That aside, I would really think that it is through these users, who could be turn out to be our eventual end-users, that we can develop a product whos functional specifications is exactly something that is really close to their heart. And perhaps, that’s what defines a fine User Experience.
