Park-It
State College, PA
Park-It is an iOS application for helping Penn State students, faculty, or visitors to get a better parking experience when trying to park within Penn State campus. The goal of Park-It is to help people understand where they are allowed to park based on the parking pass they have, what day of the week it is, and what time of day it is. The goal of Park-it is to eliminate the confusion everyone faces while attempting to park on Penn State’s campus. With this application, we intend to create a reliable source of information for anyone to access when attempting to park on campus.
Role
Our team consisted of 4 members. My role was the project manager and main software developer. My responsibilites included creating a project proposal document, developing and delegating a work schedule after completing a gannt chart, and overall supervision of the development. As the main software developer, I was also tasked with using the mockups, designs, and use cases that the team had agreed on to create a tangible, working deliverable on an iOS device.
Design
We designed the user interface with the user in mind. As such, the user interface and menus are as intuitive and user-friendly as possible. The main focus of the application will be a map of the surrounding area (Penn State Campus), with the user’s current location as the center. We wanted to reduce clutter, including only essential information that is useful and relevant to the user. As such, in the main screen, if the user is currently standing in a parking lot, the application will immediately give some basic information about the lot, and whether they can park right there based on their profile information. If opened, it would give more details about the lot. Overall, we wanted to focus on minimizing the amount of steps a user has to take to find relevant information.
Development
We used XCode and Apple's Swift programming language to build the application from the ground up. We were able to use Apple Map's API, MapKit to integrate many readily available features into our application.
Our scope during the early stages of development and deployment of the application was primarily focused on the community at Penn State campus. Once the application has been deployed and user feedback is provided, then our team will look to expand our scope beyond Penn State campus and create an application that can be supported in cities across the United States.
Challenge
Due to the lack of programming experience in the team, only I was was able to do the most of the actual development of the application. Consequently, the entire team contributed as much as possible to the initial design of the application to simplify the development process and ease the burden. Once we had a skeleton application running with all of the menus and navigation implemented, we were faced with the challenge of learning how to implement location services and best provide users geographical information to find parking. While it was initially difficult and confusing figuring out how to use and interact with the API, we were able to get the application to retrieve the user location as well as display various parking lots within the campus.