Street Cleaning Parking, 2024
App design for avoiding parking tickets in San Francisco
Role
Wireframing UI & UX Design Prototyping Branding
Tools
Figma Figjam Illustrator
Timeline
8 weeks
Final product
Street Cleaning Parking is an app that helps you remember when to move your car in order to avoid street cleaning tickets. Simply park, gps picks up on your location, tap set reminder, and customize your reminders to get notified. You can also add the reminder to your google calendar and share your car location with a friend or partner. To see this product live, download the Street Cleaning Parking app and read about our story here in the San Francisco Standard.
It's hard to keep track of when to move your car to avoid street cleaning tickets.
My partner and I bought a car together in 2023 and we were getting more and more frustrated as the number of street cleaning tickets piled up between us. In San Francisco alone 1.5 million parking tickets are issued each year generating approximately $90 million dollars. Since we didn't have a garage space, we were forced to park on neighborhood streets, each with various rules around when a car needed to be moved to avoid a ticket. It was hard to keep track of, and getting stuck with a ticket was $90.
Below is a visualization of our violations. All of our tickets occurred around our neighborhood and almost all because of forgetting to move our car due to all of the different schedules we had to keep track of! (The red pins mark where we parked and received tickets).
Low fidelity explorations
We had one goal: to reduce our tickets in 2024. I designed these early wireframes to focus the user on when exactly our car needed to be moved depending on what street you parked on. The V1 version had a simple modal that popped up and a banner at the top.
MVP designs
Our MVP designs were simple consisting mainly of a map screen and a bottom pop-up modal. The user flow was to park, set a reminder, and then a banner at the top appeared telling you a reminder was set. Two notifications were automatically set: 1 hour before the street cleaning time and ten minutes before the time. Why? We initially wanted the act of setting a notification to be automatic so there was little actions a user had to take. Later on we would add custom notification to address feedback on this.
Feedback
After releasing the app to a small beta group of 300 users, we collected feedback through a google sheet. The google sheet allowed us to gather as much feedback as we could quickly.
We made decisions based on the data we collected from our beta testers, but also on how easy/ fast we could act on the improvements. Any themes that were more complicated, were tabled for the time being as we addressed impactful feedback that was relatively easy to implement. Listening to users was important, but getting the app on the app store quickly was crucial as we didn't want to lose people's interest. Our users were excited and we wanted to show them progress fast.
We added a search field so users could search addresses to check the schedule for that street, a google calendar integration, and the ability to set more custom notifications based on feedback collected.
Here's what our final app screens looked like with more custom notifications, calendar integration, and search.
App Store
Before we added Street Cleaning Parking to the app store we had a big decision to make. Would we make it free or paid? I was a fan of making it free and collecting more feedback to make it better. Pablo (the one building it) wanted to make it paid in order to get a quick signal on whether Street Cleaning Parking could be monetized. His reasoning made sense to me so we started jamming on some payment screens.
We would offer a free trial. Below is what my initial flow looked like. As a user, I absolutely despise getting charged for a product when I haven't received any kind of notification or warning that the charge is coming. I decided to develop a flow that mimicked Blinkist's famous free trial flow as had attended Jaycee Day's presentation at Config, and felt inspired by it.
Cut to the final screens and we ended up simplifying to just one payment screen with two options for payments – a yearly price and a monthly price. After feedback from Pablo, we decided my initial payment flow was too much extra work to implement and we could set that up later (every decision we made was based on how quickly we could get it to the store).
We opted for sharing a few positive reviews and creating an info screen to explain to users our goals for the app, as well as store items such as privacy information (a legal requirement).
Waiting for Apple to get back to us on our app submission was brutal but after four weeks Street Cleaning Parking got accepted to the iOS app store, a huge win! It is now available for download and has a free trial.
Impact
So far in 2024, Pablo and I have gotten 0 tickets. 448 people have downloaded the app and it has been helping San Franciscans avoid tickets since January. We are using any profits from the app to make it better, and we hope people continue to download it and avoid tickets.
Future considerations
One thing I'd love to play with in the future is gamifying the app. Incentivizing users to avoid tickets through "ticket streaks" would up-level the experience. Getting an idea of how much money you've saved through streaks would be interesting to test.
We have also gotten requests to create family accounts for the app so that a couple or a family can be logged into one account through different devices to keep track of the same vehicles. It could also be interesting to explore having Street Cleaning Parking in multiple cities. For now, we're sticking to SF until we collect more data.
Promotional materials
We created a set of ads to place on people's cars in the city and we also created a web landing page to inform users of the amount of tickets they'd gotten in 2023. We learned a lot testing both of these out. While we ended up getting a few more users through the "fake" tickets, some users did not appreciate it so we ended up shutting down the campaign early. While the web lander was interesting, it didn't drive as many downloads as we expected.
We are currently testing out different ways to drive more downloads of the app including a set of community posters and more videos on social, like the one below! Follow us on X and Instagram to learn more.
Promotional Landing Page
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Promotional Video