Motorists in Singapore have to tear pre-paid paper coupons to pay for parking in some public car parks. They will need to tear many pieces if they were to park for a long period of time. If they want to extend parking, they will have to run back to their vehicle to tear more coupons. It is an outdated and cumbersome solution.

We wanted to develop a digital parking system that can replace the paper coupons, to give citizens the convenience of being able to pay for parking easily and extend parking remotely.

In October 2017, we released Parking.sg, a mobile app that allows motorists in Singapore pay for parking charges at all coupon-based public car parks. The app has these 3 main features.

8 people in total, 3-4 at any one time (i.e. 1 Product Manager, 2 Developers and 1 Designer) We also worked with public servants in car park operations at the various government agencies. I did most of the ux and inital ui design work. Sarah Salim, a fellow designer, defined the overall visual design.

There were many features we want to consider, but some will take more effort and some will have better return of investment of effort in terms of benefits to the users. We plot them on a Ipact vs Effort matrix to help focus our attention on the most impoetant features.

There are some key product decisions that are quite unique to this app

No user accounts
User accounts has very little value add in the case of the parking app. Sure, we lose the ability to track parking history on different phones, or possibly the potential of digital wallets, but for this app to have high adoption, we need to reduce the barrier of entry. These also makes it easier for visitors to Singapore to download and use the app immediately. Unlike other types of consumer apps where we want to optimise screen time and loyalty, Parking.sg is designed to reduce as much interaction as possible to make it trivial for users to download and use.

Block-Refund Charging Mechanism
We wanted to implement a charging mechanism that is fair to the user. User should only pay for what they park, unlike the parking coupons that charge users in 30 minutes block. There are 2 ways that this can be done. As illustrated below, the block-refund design gives user the benefit of per-minute charging.

Another incentive of this design is that we will not need to implement additional admin systems to perform refunds if users forget to turn off their phones.

Consolidating sessions into bills
Most parking session on average is around an hour which means it cost $2.40. Administrative cost to the payment gateways will be high per transaction. To reduct this cost, we implemented a batching system that batches sessions into bills. This is a more complex concept to educate the user. They must be able to associated sessions to bills.

To help us understand how we can design the system to integrate with the existing enforcement process, we walked the ground with the enforcement officer. She shows us the electronic handheld device (EHT) that she uses to check for season parking information. She also uses it to issue summon. Since she already has this device, we need to find a way to send the real-time digital parking data to her.

In late 2016, during the discovery phase, I prepared the following interview questions and interviewed 5 people who drive and uses the parking coupons.

With that information, I plotted this customer journey map to visualise the highlights and pain points of a motorist's parking journey. Looking for parking and paying for parking create the most hassle for the user. And that is what we want to solve.