Parking is often seen as the cost of travel. Locating a spot can cause frustration as an urban driver circles lots and streets. For ADA parkers, these issues are amplified by the limited amount of parking dedicated to them and the constant abuse of occupancy in ADA spaces. In collaboration with our partners at iAccess Life, we sought to understand what cities can do to improve the parking experience for those with disabilities and gain greater insight into what's actually happening at the curb.
Challenge
For those with disabilities, navigating an urban environment can be a daunting task. Parking can also create challenges for disabled citizens: inclement weather, steep inclines, placement of ADA spaces, and abuse of ADA spaces by commercial vehicles are all issues. Passport’s partnership with iAccess Life provided an opportunity to better understand these challenges and address them by designing tools giving parking managers valuable data about the experiences disabled parkers encounter.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Services
UX Research
Persona Development
User Journey Mapping
Design Thinking Workshop
Visual Design
Concept Testing
Methods and Approach
User Research
In order to fully understand the challenge, we needed to identify who was being affected and how their experiences overlapped. We interviewed people with various disabilities in order to focus on a group actively using ADA spaces. We found that the most frequent users were disabled parkers with mobility impairments. Additionally, we interviewed parking managers to understand how they were managing the curb specifically for disabled parkers. We found that most of the parking managers we spoke with could not tell us how many ADA approved spaces they managed or what condition they were in.
To help our internal teams empathize with our key stakeholders we held a Design Thinking workshop where product, engineering , sales, and client success teams could align on the user journeys and identify pain points as well as opportunities along the way. We discovered that managers lacked the data and digital tools that could provide meaningful insight into ADA needs.
Our initial research allowed us to create a clear definition of personas, empathy maps and user journeys, as well as consolidated possible solutions directly tied to our user's pain points.
Concept Testing
We tested various concepts with parking managers and ADA parkers prior to any high-fidelity mobile or web design work in order to fully understand the value of monitoring and tracking ADA assets, ultimately saving time and money later down the road.
ADA Dashboard Design
In collaboration with iAccess, we were able to leverage their existing model for capturing feedback from disabled parkers within the iAccess Life mobile application, surfacing and organizing valuable data for managers to act on. The final designs integrated solutions to many of the challenges we uncovered. We worked with internal stakeholders to understand which of the features in the dashboard would have the greatest impact for ADA parkers and parking managers, given timeline and engineering constraints
