Project Manager, Producer, Designer

Parkaru

What I learned:

Wireframes can be utilised as a converstion driver to hone your understanding of a cliengs needs. Not just as an artefact that defines the outut from the discovery phase of a project.

About the Project

Delivering flexible parking to the indigenous community of Australia is Parkaru's core goal, with plans to begin selling parking vouchers to customers at a fair rate, and with the convenience of reserving parking spaces for certain times.

As the company is in it's early stages the brief was simple, "We need a web presence before we can even think of starting to sell a product". The need to bring something together quickly affected the size and complexity of the site, we opted to keep things simple to speed up the design and development process. Along with this tight launch window, we had a second challenge; we essentially had no brand, apart from the parkaru logo to work with (no style guide or past design work to reference to define the visual style).

How it Went

The first stage required us to first nail down what the scope of the site entails. Was it ecommerce? A simple landing page? How much content are we accounting for? What is the goal of the website right now? All questions were answered over a phone call, and the goal was set. A one page website with two main jobs; inform and gather leads.

With a fair idea of the business and the clients goals, I headed straight to wireframes, outlining a user journey for a one pager which gives enough room to introduce the business with the necessary forms for lead generation and a bonus download link for a sister-product PRKA, developed also by the team at App Boxer.

Wireframe (after the addition of copy) - Introduce, Inform, Grant Value and Capture.

With wireframes complete and content provided by the client, our next step was the visual design, one problem... we have no brand. I had full creative freedom to do with the design as I wished, with two requirements, the brand had to hint towards the Aboriginal and Torres Strait identity in the use of colour. It also had to feel fresh, new, techy and formal. I used this as a platform to subtly explore a recent trend in a lot of UI design, inspired by the Mac OS and IOS glassy aesthetic.

Turned out wonderfully and the client was thrilled! Nailed it in one round of feedback.

Next Step, Development

The final step was a knowledge-transfer with the dev team, gathering development credentials to get this baby online and the project is complete! (Not without internal review with the dev team, advising on fixes, CSS styling improvements and copy updates).

From first email correspondence to a live website - Including QA and collaboration on the build produced by the dev team - the project spanned about 1.5 months.

Explore the product: