City Parking

With the completion of the Private Parking project, Telemetric decided to move forward with their roadmap, so that by building on the experience of the previous development, we could shape this new venture. The pillars were capitalizing on the recently finished work and leveraging the existing foundation as much as possible.

What is City Parking? The first thing we can say is that it’s an app that allows users to pay for metered parking in different cities. Nowadays, fewer and fewer people pay for street parking using the traditional parking meter, physically located on some corners of the city. Digital tools are gaining ground.

And in every place we go, we need a different app. While this is not the case for most people, for those who travel a lot, it can be an inconvenience. This was one of the needs the client wanted to address. They also wanted to offer an innovative tool that would allow municipalities or smaller towns to adopt metered parking.

From the past experience, the first thing we learned was that the app needed to work as a wallet, because entering all the credit card details for each payment was too tedious. By instead loading credit, the process became much faster for the user. And as a side effect, it also opened up new business expansion opportunities for the company.

This project also included a web platform and two apps instead of just one. As with the previous project, the web platform was intended for management/administration, while the apps were designed for on-the-street use. From the web platform, we highlight these features:

• Definitions (and validations) of Parking Zones/Areas
• Rates by: Zone, Day, Hour, Vehicle Type
• Management of Warnings and Fines
• Payment History
• Warning History
• Infraction History
• Creation of Cash Top-up Points

As mentioned, two apps were developed: One for users (general public) and another for inspectors, who must be previously authorized to log into the app. Starting with the inspectors, the app allows:

• Login by day and time
• Work Zone Assignment
• Geolocation of Warnings and Infractions
• Taking photos on the spot as evidence
• Automatic alerts when courtesy time expires
• Quick license plate verification

And for the users:

• Account registration and validation
• Password recovery via email code
• Open parking sessions
• Rates and payments by zone
• Schedule parking for the next business day
• Extend parking sessions
• Balance top-ups: Online and Cash
• Balance transfer between users
• Geolocation of Cash Top-up Points

I was given complete freedom to approach the project and decide the best way to design each feature, prioritizing usability and intuitive interfaces. While this often meant rethinking (on the go) features that had already been finalized and tested, every time it happened, the satisfaction of knowing the new approach was better made it worthwhile.

Once again, I feel honored to have accompanied them through the process. We implemented a video-tutorial format to showcase progress, which turned out to be very agile, convenient, and also left behind material that could be used to create manuals and tutorials for the general public.