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Project Overview

Who doesn't like Cheap Parking? Australia has some of the world's most expensive car parks and it's your choice to compare and choose the cheapest or most convenient car park for your trip. Cheap Parking is the only independent car park rate comparison app for Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and is guaranteed to save you money the next time you use it. We cover all private operators, council car parks, shopping centres, hotels and hospitals giving you the widest coverage possible.

Organisation

FastShop Pty Ltd

Team

David Lu and Gerard McLennan.

Project Brief

The Cheap Parking app was built to overcome the problems drivers face with finding car parking around major cities and densely populated areas. We have developed a smarter way to find the cheapest, closest and the most relevant parking to your journey.

Get the most comprehensive car park information at your fingertips including rates, operating hours, maps and directions. Sort car parks by the cheapest or closest based on your location or refine your search by filtering services such as car wash, toilets, valet parking, etc…You can also save a car park as a favourite or send an email with the car park information to a friend or colleague.

Project Innovation / Need

The beauty of the app was that it was conceived out of a genuine consumer need, the founders David Lu and Gerard McLennan conceptualised the app trying to solve their own problems but soon realised this was a concern to all city motorists. Imagine an app where you could find information, look up specials and compare rates with other car parks within walking distance before you even started your car. No other parking app has anywhere near the amount of coverage, information and data credibility than ‘Cheap Parking’. The data is ‘live’ meaning it is updated daily through live feeds, manual auditing and user feedback so you will always have the most up to date information.

Another innovative feature is our ‘Cheap Parking’ rate calculation engine. When a user enters their destination, day of the week and the duration of their stay, the app will return the most relevant results taking into consideration distance, operating hours and special rates such as early birds, evening & weekend flat rates.

We believe this app encapsulates all the benefits of smart phone technology and the true essence of a mobile app. Using location based services to deliver relevant content, accessing a vast amount of information via web services (information is only queried when required) and embracing the native app user interface making it instantly easy to use and familiar to the user as soon as they pick it up.

User Experience

One of the most important use cases for the app was that it had to load quickly and show results instantly. We imagined that the user would be in a hurry (possibly in their car) and just wanting to find the “cheapest parking” in the area. Therefore we decided that on launch of the app, even before any user interaction would occur, the app would instantly show results based on their current location.

This would be a good starting point and from there the user may start to explore and refine their search. We kept the refinement options detailed enough to really narrow down the results but also make the user experience not so confronting. This is achieved by four simple options for sorting & viewing results. Firstly you can sort the results by either the cheapest (for the price conscious) or by the closest (for the convenience conscious). You can then either choose to display the results on a map or in a list, again depending on the user preference to compare rates or distance.

Within one or two taps the user can be viewing the complete information for their chosen car park including the address, phone numbers, rates, clearance height restrictions and services available on-site. To complete the user journey, the user has options to get directions to the car park, email to a friend, save to their favourites or view in the native maps application.

Project Marketing

Our marketing strategy has definitely been focused on our users as ultimately this app was built as a consumer service. We decided to make the app free and will endeavour to keep it free for as long as we can, on the basis that our users will spread the word about how much money they saved by using our app. Earlier this year we were lucky enough to have the support of www.carsales.com.au who continue to fund a proportion of our development and marketing costs.

The backbone of the app has always been about delivering information to the user and letting them make their own choice and we have since built a presence as an independent source of commentary about the car parking industry. So through various media channels such as newspaper, radio and television we make the consumer aware of changes, which affect them.

As with any business these days, the use of social media is essential in marketing. We aim to provide a tailored experience for our network and interact with them on a personal level.

We consistently rank in the top 10 navigation apps in the App store and currently have a 4.5 star rating which is a testament to the satisfaction of our users.