THE CUCUMBER CAR PARK APP

27/01/2015

Late last year we were set the challenge to come up with a concept for an internal project. We would be given three days to complete it and any necessary resources supplied.  Other than that, the brief was open.

We had a week to submit our ideas with the pick of the bunch scheduled to be worked on the following week. Let the brainstorm begin!

Our Cucumber office is located within the Tauranga CBD and we can have at any one time up to 25 employees in the office, with almost all (excluding a few keen cyclists) driving a car to work.  Car parking is a hot commodity in the city and with only 10 allocated staff car parks, the rest of us have to help fund the council or play cat and mouse with the meter man to avoid fines. I did notice however (after walking several blocks from the closest free park in town) that when I got to the office that parking spaces were available. A lot of our team are often on the road travelling to visit clients so their parks remain unused for the day.

So the idea was born. We could develop an app for the Cucumber team that would allow people to share their car parks when they’re not in the office or away sick. 

The app allows team members to login either as a car park owner or car park loaner and share their parking spaces between each other. The incentive for the car park owner is that an IOU system within their account would display how many times a certain person had used their park and after a nominated amount a small reward e.g.: coffee could be owed.

The project team consisted of 4 people (1 designer, 2 front-end developers and 1 back-end developer) and went for 3 Burger Fuel and energy drink fuelled days. Day one consisted of concept refinement, wire framing and design. Day two saw the start of the project build with the setting up of login accounts and the organising of the main calendar that was to drive the releasing and booking of the car park spaces. On the final day we created the IOU accounts against each user and tested. It was a huge effort from the team and without sounding like too much of a cliché the biggest learning for me was that a lot more can be achieved faster and better through collaboration and working as a team. By exclusively all having the same uninterrupted goal we could all work at the same pace and there was little to no delay between actions. This ultimately allowed us to have a working prototype ready to go and out for user testing within 3 days.

Overall it was a great experience with the whole team coming together to create what turned out to be a challenging but fun application. 

If this application is something that interests you, please contact Cucumber to discuss your requirements.

Written by Kyle Turner