Beep Beep parking dashboard

Continuing with our series of blog posts, this one is dedicated to our dashboard and two particular leaps of faith we believe are key to the success of Beep Beep parking.

1^st Leap of faith: People will use an app to find parking spots in busy cities

Hypotheses

1. Parking is difficult in busy cities
2. People don’t want to waste time looking for parking spots

Measures

We thought of combining information from desktop and also from on the field research:

1.  # of people with cars  v/s # of parking spots
2. Time spent looking for a spot

Tests

After defining our measures, we thought of ways to coming up with the information:

1. Online information to corroborate “scarcity”
2. On the field interview

Findings

According to Iamsterdam, there are currently 263,000 cars in Amsterdam. The traffic that the city receives every day is divided between bikes (32%), cars (22%) and public transport (16%). This means that the 57,860 cars that make the 22% traffic movement have only 4,454 parking spots available in Amsterdam city center.

When we went out to interview users, they responded that it took them between 10 to 30 mins looking for parking spots, with an average of 15 mins. When asked about using the help of an app most of positive responses came from younger users

Conclusions

Our conclusions to this leap of faith are that the scarcity of parking spots in Amsterdam city center makes finding a parking spot a time consuming activity. On the bright side, younger users are willing to use an app to assist them in the search for parking spots.

 

2^nd leap of faith: People will share parking spots for free

Hypotheses

Our hypothesis for this leap of faith are

1. Gamification will encourage people to share
2. People want to be part of a sharing community

Both of these share one previous hypothesis which is that people are used to social media

Measures

Only one measure for this one: # of positive responses to the model

Tests

We think this kind of information can only be found on the field, so the test will be a interview with app screenshots. This will help the people understand the functionalities of the app and will also give us instant feedback about the appearance of the app.  

Findings

1. People are used to share via apps and social media, the idea of sharing is not new to them
2. People don’t think it would be hard/ time consuming to share
3. Gamification used in the app needs to be precise to motivate people to share without looking too childish
4. More features are needed to make the app interesting

Conclusions

Thanks to the rise in social media, sharing via an app on their phones is already part of the user’s mind set. It’s simple, fast and rewarding. But in order for users to choose to open the app, it needs to be a game experience for them. This means the design and layout, but also means more features to make opening the app worth their while.