The Elevator Pitch
ParkingMe is an app that’s been on my phone since I first discovered it and will never be deleted. It does one or two things, does them perfectly, and provides a definable value to me every time I use it. What’s it do? That’s simple. It gives you real time available-spots/capacity for parking garages in most major cities and towns in Switzerland.
Functionalities and Scenarios
The app is very simple and straightforward. It has a bottom navigation which includes the following features
Cities
A simple drill down menu of Swiss cities. Click on one and it’ll take you to the real time stats for all that city’s parking garages. Click on one of the garages and it takes you to a screen which shows you the capacity and available spots, a graph showing how the available spots changes over the course of the day, the address, the prices, the opening hours, and any additional information (such as if they take credit cards or if their is a height restriction). Lastly, it provides links to map out a route to that garage (choose between Apple Maps, Google Maps, or pasting the coordinates to the clipboard).
Map
This is a map. Yep. It has green pins for parking garages that are open and have spots and red pins for garages that are closed or are full. I often use this when I’m traveling outside of Luzern to find the parking garage closest to my destination. Clicking a pin takes you to the screen showing all the information about that specific garage.
Localization
I’ve never used this functionality. Basically it shows a compass like interface that points you toward the closest parking garage and the number of available spots. Not especially actionable but it does have a Route link to at least put the garage in context on a map for you.
Favorites
This is easily the most visited part of the app for me. When you are on an individual parking garage screen you can click the star icon in the top right to mark that garage as one of your favorites.
Scenarios
How do I use this app? It’s quite simple. If I need to go some place in Luzern that requires a car I will consult the app to see which parking garages are my best options giving how many spaces are available. Many times it’s saved me from making a poor choice on a busy Saturday when the Schweizerhof or Kessleturm garages are full.
When I’m driving outside of Luzern I use the app to find the closest garage to my destination and I use the capacity graph to get a sense of how busy it will be at the time I expect to need a parking spot. That has also saved me a few times from having to audible on the fly.
User Experience
This app is not going to win any design awards. But it doesn’t need to. The interface is simple and there is no clutter. I wish that the Favorites screen was the default but that’s a minor quibble.
The app uses the phone’s GPS to discern your location and provides the personalization to allow you to define a list of your favorite parking garages. It doesn’t even have a Settings area or any information about the app. It’s almost as if it was just dropped into the app store by the Parking Gods.
Thank you, Parking Gods for your kind offering.
Price : Free
