An Exploratory Analysis of Human-centric Issues in Parking Solutions Using Surveys and Mobile Parking App Reviews

Due to the imbalance between the supply and demand of parking spaces, parking has become difficult, and therefore significantly impacts people’s daily lives. Although some parking solutions have been developed to alleviate parking difficulties, few studies focus on exploring the human-centric aspects that affect parking difficulties. In order to determine the differences in parking difficulties faced by people with different human-centric characteristics, we conducted an online survey to collect information about different people’s human-centric aspects (age, gender, emotion, etc.), parking experiences, and parking preferences. Based on the responses from 189 car users, we found a significant relationship between car users’ emotions and their overall perception of parking difficulties. Also, other human-centric attributes, including gender, age, country, and parking preferences, are significantly related to the time spent in searching for available parking spaces. Additionally, we collected and manually categorized 1,192 user reviews of five parking apps available on the Google Play store. As a result, seven human-centric issue categories from the reviews were identified, including Parking Preferences & Habits, Autonomy, Emotion, Compatibility, Inclusiveness, Privacy & Reliability, and Socio-economic Aspect. Moreover, eight functionality issues are mainly discussed by users in the app reviews, including App Pre-Operation, Searching & Online Booking Function, Payment Function, UI & UX, App Workflow, App Information & Notification, App Operation Efficiency, and Feature Request. Based on a manual analysis of the reviews, we also found that different human-centric issues are often discussed together with particular functionality issues. Thus, we suggest that developers need to consider the importance of human-centric aspects by getting users involved in the process of app development to explore different requirements for diverse users. Moreover, exploring more user reviews on various platforms can serve to understand the human-centric challenges and needs in parking apps in order to improve user experiences.