ParkWhiz

FIND YOUR HAPPY SPACE

Chicago and other big cities are notorious for difficult parking – traffic and privately managed parking garages make finding the most convenient and affordable spots a pain. ParkWhiz started in 2006 and works with over 4,000 facilities nationwide. I was the sole Product Designer (UI and UX) and worked on a complete redesign of the products as well as the launch of a new pricing model and marketing campaign – Find Your Happy Space.

The parking industry had several competitors and a lot of blue signs and generic car iconography to compete with. I developed three new concepts and directions to take the brand in, presented to the C-Suite team, and worked with various departments to extend our brand. We hired a freelance brand designer (Allan Peters) to create a new logo along with our new brand concept 'find your happy space.' 

A fair amount of users were using the desktop site to learn about ParkWhiz and book parking spaces. I worked through user flows, looked through our analytics to find the pain points and drop off spots, and focused on making the experience take almost half as few clicks to book a parking space. I developed high-fidelity wireframes so our development team could begin the new framework while I implemented our new visual design system. 

Our primary users were using their iOS and Android app to navigate to the parking space and to get into each garage (by showing a pass on their phone). The old app was slow, confusing and inconsistent between the two apps. I worked with the developers to A/B test lots of small design decisions – when showing parking results on a map, there's a fine line between showing too many results, and not showing enough. It's one of my favorite things about working in digital design – you could go on theories that decision fatigue would apply here, but users want to see value and know we have a large inventory. Testing is the best way to find that sweet spot.