Discovering a Problem

As a group, we began to brainstorm potential topics for an app that we wanted to develop.

Scanners in Cornell parking garages which analyze whether a parking spot is free or not. Shows users on a map if spots are taken or not through colors red/ green.

1. User Group: The user group for this project idea is anyone who would like to park on Cornell campus. This includes all sorts of faculty, students, and visitors.

2. Problem Space: The problem that occurs is simple; it is hard to find parking on Cornell campus. Moreover, given the different parking passes, it can be difficult to know where one is and is not allowed to park. 

3. Significance: This project will impact the user group by making it easier to find parking, thus saving them time and making the issue of finding parking less stressful. By providing real-time parking availability data, the system will reduce the time users spend circling around parking lots searching for a spot. This time-saving aspect is especially valuable during busy periods like class transitions, events, or peak work hours. In addition, with clearer parking availability, there will be less need for vehicles to drive aimlessly around, which could help reduce traffic congestion on campus, especially in high-demand areas.

4. Access to user group: We can easily recruit at least 10 individuals for an in-person user study for this project idea. Ethan lives with 28 people and around 20 of them have cars and face this parking issue on a daily basis.. Matan lives with 25 people, 16 of which have cars at Cornell. Ella has about 50 coworkers, and at least 10 of them have cars. We also have friends, acquaintances, or coworkers who drive and face the same problem

Justification: As students at Cornell, we have faced the struggle of driving into a parking lot with little time before class and seeing no free spots. We have a passion for helping students not feel this frustration and want to help create transparency with where open spots are on campus. In addition, since so many students and faculty struggle with this issue we believed that we could find many potential users to recruit for user interviews. Also, this idea stood out from the other ideas since it used diverse technology outside of just a web/mobile app, as this idea would require some sort of hardware to be installed in parking garages to track the availability of parking spots.