ParkMobile
Digital Parking for Safer & Smarter Journeys
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Fall 2025
Figma, qual/quantitative research methods
Industry Sponsored Project, Research to Design
UX Research + Design
4 (X-CITE!: Irene, Elva, Tanvi, Cameron)
Overview
This was a semester long project that I worked on my first-year of graduate school. I collaborated with an incredible team of designers and researchers, as well as receiving mentorship from an UX researcher from Arrive. This project addresses a problem the industry sponsor (Arrive) provides based on their interests and business needs that they’re hoping to implement in the future. The final design suggestions supports users from the end-to-end driving journey.
Introduction
How might we help drivers feel more informed and secure when choosing where to park, by addressing concerns around safety and availability, and encouraging engagement with ParkMobile earlier in their journey?
Arrive is a leading mobility platform with over 14 million users.
Arrive is a leading mobility platform owning multiple brands such as ParkMobile, EasyPark, and etc. It acts as a third-party to help manage parking payments. Within the U.S., ParkMobile leads the parking app market with 14.1 million users.
The issue with parking now is that it’s stressful and issues concerning safety, and all these high costs and availability hurts businesses.
48% of Americans consider parking to be a stressful event. Automotive Fleet. (2022)
Parking in a city is a “free-for-all”. Atlanta Magazine. (2023)
Vehicle thefts rose about 42% from 2019 to 2023. Atlanta Magazine. (2023)
High parking costs & poor access hurt businesses. Atlanta Magazine. (2023)
If drivers have a need for safety and planning, why do they use the app for a few seconds?
Based on prior arrive UXR, drivers in the U.S. tend to value safety and plan ahead of time where they park. Drivers needs are mismatched with how they use ParkMobile. ParkMobile has:
Lack of Parking Info & Search Functionality
Lack of Pre-Parking Support & Safety Visibility
Research
I conducted surveys, intercept interviews (on the street interviews), competitive analysis, and semi-structured interviews to better understand what users are like and come up with our key findings to create user personas, user needs, and design implications which would then influence the final design decisions.
Drivers care about (1) efficient and simple parking, (2) safety, (3) smooth post-parking, (4) knowledge of lot & features, (5) accessibility, and (6) often times information online is mismatched with reality.
Drivers can be categorized into Accessibility + Family Oriented, Hyper-Planner, and a Spontaneous Parker.
Accessibility + Family Oriented: A driver that is concerned about the accessibility of their parking spot, has to consider moving with a stroller or a family member in a wheel chair.
Hyper-Planner: A driver who is extremely catious of where they park. They tend to look up parking days ahead on maps, forums, and any other digital resource.
Spontaneous Parker: A driver who does not think about where they park until they get to their location. They aren’t worried about planning ahead of time.
User Needs → Design Implications
Based on the research findings and user personas, (13) user needs were created that then helped translate into the following (7) design implications.
D1: Clear Parking Information
D2: Support Pre-Parking
D3: Visualize Real-Time Information
D4: Accurate Information Around Safety
D5: Understandable Iconography
D6: Walking distance guidance
D7: Support Post-Parking
Design Details
The team and I went through an iterative design process of brainstorming, sketching, wireframing, and and coming up with the final designs.
Sketches
DI1: List information clearly about the parking spot
DI2: Taken care of pre-parking experience
DI3: Visualize geographic and environmental hazards
DI4: Information around safety
DI5: Visual elements or icons for quick evaluations
DI2: Taken care of pre-parking experience
*Helps assist those with accessibility concerns
DI4: Information around safety
DI6: Providing walking distance guidance
DI7: Support post-parking experience
Wireframes
Design System
Final Designs
Evaluation and Validation
To evaluate the effectiveness of the designs, the team conducted a cognitive walkthrough with UX experts. To validate the designs and to ensure the features were practical, understandable, and something users wanted, the team conducted task-based user testing. Based on these two tests, we combined findings to list next steps for the designs.
Future iterations should focus on refining visual clarity of parking information, and ensure a way to build trust with users on how data is used and store.
Visual Clarity & Information Overload: Reduce visual clutter by showing only high-level availability and hazard icons on the map and having visual hards that expand upon users tapping.
Feature Discoverability & User Understanding: Have insights view as default and let users turn it off. Turn filters into a scrollable pill to show what’s applied.
Clarity of Parking Availability Information: Continue to support quick confident decision making by adding clearer parking availability labels and remove ambiguous data points.
Filter Visibility & Interaction Efficiency: Make the filters applied to results more obvious by imitating the contrast on the filter screen for consistency. Provide filter presets to increase efficiency for users and use clearer action terminology for save versus apply.
Live Activity Information Readability: Make the labels for numbers on live activity feature more visible and improve spacing on the widget to support quick scanning.
Session Management Convenience: Enable users to extend their session from the lock screen with a dedicated button to streamline their workflow.
Review Trust & Effort Reduction: Give users more information on how reviews and their data is being used to increase trust. Ensure reviews are low-effort and as less time consuming as possible.
Conclusion
Drivers, of all kind, value being able to make quick decisions for parking planning and safety through the different icons, filters, and images, introduced.
Personal Reflection
This was such an incredible team to work with. It was such a fun process of being able to work with an industry UX Researcher, to understanding what was happening behind the scenes at ParkMobile, and be able to advocate for the user. It’s gratifying knowing that the work we’re doing is aligned with ParkMobile’s future goals. I hope to see these features implemented in the future! If I were to do anything differently in this process, it would be to possibly differentiate a bit more for the expert and user tests for our last test cycles. Overall, this project really pushed my experience in UXR and allowed me to apply my learnings to design. This case study references the slides that my team and I had created for our final presentation.
thank you for visiting ~