Developing smart parking app requirements with personas

Finding a parking space can be very stressful and time consuming. A variety of different vehicle parking applications have been developed but many fail to support diverse end-users. We captured diverse human-centric issues from user reviews and literature, and then created personas that encompass a wide representative range of parking app user groups. Using these personas, user stories were created, categorized and parking app tasks prioritized. We used these to develop a prototype new “smart parking app”. A cognitive walkthrough was employed using each of the personas and user stories to evaluate the app. With more human-centric factors taken into account in the design and development of the app, we found that majority of the human-centric frustrations identified were resolved when compared with a commonly used parking app.

The main contributions of this work include:

  • we identified key challenges with current smart city apps – specifically for parking – in failing to meet diverse end-user human-centric needs
  • we developed a set of personas to represent these diverse parking app end-users
  • we developed a set of user stories using these personas to better support all of these diverse end-users of smart parking apps
  • we prototyped such an app using React Native and perform a cognitive walk-through evaluation of it and a representative existing parking app, showing our prototype meets many more diverse end-user requirements
  • we discussed lessons learned from this research to improve human-centric smart city app development in general

Publication and presentation

Investigators

Prof. John Grundy, Chenlin Li, Yuting Yu, Jeremy Leckning, Weicheng Xing, Chun Long Fong, Devi Karolita, Dr Jenny McIntosh and Dr Humphrey Obie