A fully automated auto-valet system built right over the freeway. A seamless mode of transportation switch with the tap of your phone. All tied into one no-frills ecosystem. This is the Urban Capillary.
Group Roles: Kush Vakharia (Concept Development), Yiwen Zhao (UX Design), Hudson Musnicki (Graphic Design), Jared Teiger (3D Modeling and Visualization)
Atlanta, along with most other big cities, has a traffic problem. We found 3 key insights: users want to make commute time worthwhile, they want the infrastructure to match their desired actions, and they want spaces that they can personalize. Essentially, precious time that could be spent exploring the city or trying new things is being wasted, and there's a few things we can do to reclaim that time.
As a group, we came up with 400+ thumbnails to understand the possible solutions which satisfied our key insights. We then refined down to 5 concepts each (20 concepts) which were critiqued. From there, we understood where we could refine down. Our goal was to develop criteria for our design through picking out the good ideas and reworking the bad ones.
Our concept became a freeway cap which allowed users to seamlessly switch from car to bike, bus, or train to finish their journey. We could get cars off the road and allow users to traverse the city while avoiding traffic. We tied it together with a metrocard type system.
We wanted to test whether an auto valet system to streamline the parking experience would align with current mental models. It didn’t. Using these findings, we iterated on the design. We also tested whether the pass system was understandable across modes.
We decided to rework the user journey to focus on the freeway driver entering the city and switching transportation modes to avoid traffic and get to his destination on time. With 3 key areas of focus to enable the journey, we could complete the final design.
