⁉️ Problem
In Vietnam, where motorbikes are prevalent, traditional parking methods like handwritten tickets, plastic cards, and e-cards are susceptible to forgery, loss, or are financially burdensome for SMEs. Moreover, their cash-only payment is inconvenient. I wonder why we do not utilize smartphones, which are popular devices in Vietnam, to solve these problems.
This system is my scientific thesis project in my university to propose an innovative mobile phone-based parking system that solves above problems with cost effectiveness and heightened security.
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Fragile/Forged parking tickets
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Difficulty in finding parking lots
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Insecured and inconvinient payment
🧑 User Research
We had a survey to 132 people who was students, office workers, and parking lot owners in Ho Chi Minh City to discover their mobile and motorcycle usage behaviours. We asked them questions such as how often they use mobile phones, what operating systems they have, what problems they face when using our current parking systems, and do they have a vehicle registration certificate.
From the insights from that survey, we concluded two general personas for this system.
Lanh - Officer
Age
28 years old
Location
Ho Chi Minh City
Bio
Lanh is a staff in an agency. She usually has her motorbike parked in small parking lot. She had some bad experiences of losing her parking cards in there.
Goal
- Get rid of losing parking cards.
- Checkout using e-wallets instead of cash.
- Easier to seek for parking lots.
- More secure way for parking
Hoang - Parking Lot Owner
Age
36 years old
Location
Ho Chi Minh City
Bio
Hoang is a parking lot owner that wants to find an affordable but secure parking system to replace the old paper one.
Goal
- Introduce his parking lot to customers.
- Have a convenient payment method instead of cash.
- Don't spend too much money on big parking system.
🧠 Solving Problem
With deep consideration of options, we came up with a concept for this new system. The system contains two apps for parking users and parking lot owners, with QR Code as a communication technology. This system eliminates the need for cards or tickets, simplifies parking lot search via maps, and enables convenient payments via credit cards or e-wallets.
🚧 App structures
📱 User Interface
End-user App
- Onboarding
- Registration Flow using Identification Card (with the technique of OCR)
- Add vehicle using registration certificate (with the technique of OCR)
- Check-in & check-out flow
- Account information & Parking history & Vehicles management (with vehicle-transfer flow)
Parking lot owner App
- Registration Flow
- Motorbike check-in & check-out using QR Code Scanner
- Parking history & revenue report
- Parking lot information, price and working schedule settings
- Staff management
💳 Backup method
For the case that there is an user having not installed the app or forgotten to bring phones, the backup method is an device that can store and display QR Code. In this way, park owner has one more step of capturing vehicle's license plate for comparing when the user checks out.
👏 Conclusion
The solution could achieve the goals of making it low-cost, card-free, secure and convenient system. However, it still has some issues to set up widely due to laws, people awareness and privacy. Therefore, when coming to real life, it could be set up at some companies and schools at the first stage before widening.