From empathizing to prototyping.
Written by
Published
AirSpot - a mobile app that allows users to find remotely and list car parking spaced required screen prototypes for its seed funding campaign.
Problem statement: Users invest unnecessary amounts of time and money in bad parking lot spaces and use services that are distant, insecure, and unsafe.
Goal: Create intuitive designs for a complex and innovative service. Add interactions that are seamless and familiar to already existing apps in the market.
We focused on developing proto-personas to better understand and address user needs. Two key proto-personas emerged: Pedro, a student, and Susana, a clinical teacher. Both face the frustration of constantly moving between classes, meetings, and work, leading to frequent parking challenges and unnecessary expenses on gas and social activities. By creating these proto-personas, we established a clear reference point that guided the design of intuitive and seamless interactions, aligning AirSpot with familiar user experiences in the market.
During the ideation phase for AirSpot, we explored various wireframes focusing on the sign-up and onboarding flows essential for platform growth. To effectively prioritize features, we utilized an impact-effort matrix. This allowed us to identify and focus on features such as real-time parking spot updates, user listings, and online payments, while also considering the importance of community forums, ratings and reviews, and rewards to enhance user engagement and satisfaction. We opted for the first three because of their high-impact, low-effort features.
We made a survey and implemented usability testing with 10 students and 10 office workers inside the metropolitan area that matched our persona’s profiles:
Different groups of users liked the idea and found the interface useful but more importantly, the product’s target audience mentioned multiple times that this app can solve most of their frustrations.
A possibility for the future (based on qualitative data) is to analyze payment screens, user flows, and indexes to avoid overwhelming the users with multiple micro-transactions. This led to the idea of credits inside the app (like gift cards) which could be implemented.