Smart Garage Parking App

ParkingBot is the companion app for UniTron’s Smart Garage, designed to streamline your parking experience. With ParkingBot, you can effortlessly locate a Smart Garage, park your vehicle, notify the garage of your return to minimize wait times, and securely pay for parking—all from your smartphone. Parking has never been easier, more convenient, or dare we say, more enjoyable, thanks to ParkingBot!

The Story

Have You Heard About Smart Garages? The City of West Hollywood has embraced automated parking as a cutting-edge solution to the persistent challenge of creating sufficient parking spaces. Thanks to UniTron, the company behind this innovation, the Smart Garage became a reality in 2016.

Here’s how it works: you simply drive into a car “lift,” and friendly robots take over. They safely park your car—no need to circle around searching for a spot, worry about fender-benders, or navigate those tricky cement poles. When it’s time to leave, you can summon your car through a kiosk, and the same helpful robots return it to you safe and sound.

Curious? Check out the video demo of this fascinating project!

A truly smart garage, right? But here’s the catch: the only way to summon your car and pay is through the kiosk, which means waiting 10–15 minutes and using a card for payment. What if there were a better way? Could an app make the process smoother? Imagine retrieving your car with just a few taps and having it ready when you arrive. Picture paying effortlessly through your phone, skipping the kiosk entirely. We thought, YES!—and set out to explore exactly that.

How We Made It Smarter with Google Sprint

To tackle this challenge, we adopted a fresh approach: the Google Ventures Sprint. This five-day process is designed to validate risky solutions to critical business questions by focusing on targeting, designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with real customers.

While we adjusted the method to fit our schedule, we adhered to the core “daily tasks” of the Sprint process, which we’ve categorized below. Remarkably, the entire product development process took us just five days!

Monday - Map & Choose a Target

On “Monday,” we mapped out the user journey, identified the core problem, and highlighted key points to focus on. This step helped us define our direction and select the most critical target to address.

Tuesday - Sketch & Ideation

On “Tuesday,” we focused on sketching potential solutions using the “Timed Crazy 8” method. We started by revisiting the parking garage issues identified on our map and brainstorming a series of “How Might We” (HMW) questions. Then, through the structured creativity of “Timed Crazy 8,” we rapidly generated a variety of ideas on paper.

Check out the time-lapse video of our “Timed Crazy 8” session below!

Thursday - Prototype: Interface and Interaction Design

On “Thursday,” we focused on building a high-fidelity prototype for user testing. We had identified the need, but the question remained: What should we create? The answer was the Smart Garage app, which we proudly named “ParkingBot.”

ParkingBot works seamlessly with UniTron’s Smart Garage, offering a streamlined and intuitive user experience. With the app, users can:

• Locate a Smart Garage,
• Park their car into a lift,
• Notify the garage of their return to reduce wait times, and
• Pay for parking effortlessly through their phone.

This prototype brought our vision to life and set the stage for testing with real users.

Friday - User Testing & Feedback

And on “Friday,” we tested our app with real live humans. We sat down and tested our prototype with several potential users.

We were so glad to see that users loved the concept and thought the app was a crucial and necessary part of using a smart garage. However, because the app is made roughly within a Sprint process, it definitely needs many iterations. The feedback we got from the Friday's test was valuable in guiding us to the next steps.

Meet the Team