Park with Ease: Evaluating Usability to Design Intuitive Interfaces for Car Parking Applications

With a smartphone app or web interface, users with different demographic profiles may book and pay for parking spaces, cutting down on the time and stress involved in locating a place. Hence, such parking systems should be usable and intuitive to end users. Therefore, this research aims to evaluate the usability of existing car parking applications and to propose an intuitive and usable car parking application. To attain these objectives, three smart car parking mobile applications (Parking Koi, ParkWhiz, and SpotHero) were selected and evaluated through heuristic evaluation and a user study. The studies revealed several usability problems such as lack of feedback, instructions, flexibility and adaptability. According to the severity of issues, the Park Whiz application encountered the least number of issues in total, while the SpotHero program experienced the highest number of problems. Comparing with Parking Koi and SpotHero, Parkwhiz's average level of severity is substantially higher. The user study revealed that the three car parking applications' interfaces are poorly designed and provided the suggestions for improvement to enhance user attention. Finally, a prototype of a car parking application with an intuitive UIs is proposed to address the revealed usability problems.