City Profiles
Benchmarking and community building for municipal parking leaders.
Project Details
Company
Passport Labs, Inc.
Project Length
6 months
Team
Miranda B. (Product Manager)
Taras K. (Engineer)
Client Success
My Role
Lead product designer responsible for discovery, prototyping, testing and design.
Challenge
Expose more Passport data to cities so they can make smarter parking decisions
Strengthen the already tight network of municipal parking leaders
Discover the opportunities
Survey municipal parking leaders. Parking leaders rely on other cities for ideas, justification, and support. We surveyed them to find out exactly what info they'd want if they could see inside another city’s parking program.
Interview municipal parking leaders. We interviewed municipal parking leaders one-on-one and in groups using a structured protocol. We then analyzed themes: what data was off-limits, what they wanted to learn, and preferred formats for benchmarking data.
2. Synthesize research and present
Tag recurring user wants around benchmarking. For each interview, we tagged metrics we heard a bunch and later grouped them into themes which we knew would help us simplify the interface we would come to make.
Present the business case. We summarized interviews, survey data, and a market review (only one competitor) into a presentation and prototype to make the case for a Benchmarking product.
3. Prototype a full benchmarking experience
Early prototypes. Prototypes let users view and filter participating municipal parking programs, helping leaders see not just their usual benchmarks but also discover better comparison cities.
Define metrics to display. We partnered with engineering to match available metrics to user needs and added new data like city population and parking program size to give broader context.
4. Deliver and test the beta feature
Finesse the user experience flow. The initial mental model for users was to find the city they wanted to benchmark against first, then dive in and explore the available comparison metrics.
Help users determine their peer cities. As we rolled out the benchmarking feature, we enabled users to discover new peer cities and reconsider their existing benchmark choices through side-by-side comparisons.
Build evergreen benchmarking reports. Later, we introduced evergreen reports that automatically compared users to peer groups we identified as most similar based on their parking program context.
Data visualizations powered by Looker embeds and the Looker API.
Outcome
Peer Benchmarking Insights. Users learned which peer programs to compare against, who the leaders of those programs were and their contact information, and what key “settings” and rates those programs used, boosting their confidence in making decisions.
Better sell-in for clients within their city’s political system. With benchmarking, parking leaders were able to better articulate and justify the policy changes they proposed, such as rate increases (or decreases).
Unlocking Collaboration: Connecting Parking Leaders Through Peer Networking. Focus groups revealed municipal parking leaders are eager to share challenges and successes. By connecting them, we saw an opportunity to host monthly meetups and facilitate networking, since they don’t compete and benefit from collaboration nationwide and globally.
Client Success and Sales were empowered to encourage feature adoption by using benchmarking in their pitch decks.
Passport became more positioned as a thought leader in the municipal parking industry
Passport learned how to implement data visualization efficiently