Parq

Mobile App

Parq is a mobile app based in the united states focused on building and improving communities by giving people the opportunity to be involved in their public spaces. Parq is a tool that will let people feel informed about what’s happening in the public spaces of their community and they will have the opportunity to get involved.

Project Overview

My role

User research, End to end Ux/Ui Design.

Responsibilities

Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on the design and responsive design.

Duration

November 2022 - December 2022

Tools

Figma, Miro, Google Docs

The Problem

People feel isolated from what’s happening in their community, they don’t know if there is any opportunity to be more involved or when it is going to be. Sometimes people are so disconnected from their community that they don’t know their neighbors.

The Goal

Give people a tool to be more involved and informed about their community, and facilitate the chance to start a new club that they want to participate in and that they think could be beneficial for others. It also will be a tool where citizens can make petitions to governments to improve their public spaces.

To structure my design process I applied the Design thinking Method

Competitive analysis

In order to create an informative analysis of the way to give solution to this problem I have examined some of the competitors.

User research

I started the research by defining Research goals.

Based on these research goals I conducted Interviews with 15 participants and the answers gave me these results.

I developed User Personas to represent the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the target audience.

Framing problems - HMW

How might we...

Make people reappropriate of their public spaces and give a easy way to connect with their communities and stay informed of what is going on.

Ideation process

After addressing the problems, I developed Information Architecture (IA) to organize, structure, and label content in a way that makes it easy to find and understand

Digital wireframes

After ideating and drafting some paper wireframes, I created the initial design for the Parq app. These designs focused on giving information about the available options to become involved in the public space. I made them Mid-fidelity in order to make a first prototype out of them and test it with my target audience.

Testing

Using the Mid-fidelity prototype I conducted Usability tests. Here is an example of a User Journey of one of the participants.

I analyzed my results with Affinity Mapping and classified and prioritized the errors, observations, and quotes.

The Usability Study gave these Main Findings.

Refining the design

After conducting the Usability Study I continued with the design process creating High-fidelity mockups and establishing a style guide to keep the consistency in the design.

High-fidelity design

In this step, I incorporated the feedback from the Usability Study in the design.

To finalize the design process I created a High-fidelity prototype to show how the interaction with the app will be once the design is completed and to further test and iterate on the design.

You can test the prototype here.

Deliverables

Takeaways

Through this whole process, I learned that even though the problem I was trying to solve was a big one, diligently going through each step of the design process and aligning with specific User needs gave me direction and helped me come up with solutions that were both practical and useful.

Arely Garza