Ginny is a custom parking management mobile application designed and developed for Merixstudio’s internal purposes. Its main goal is to streamline the process of booking a limited number of parking spaces.
The mobile app has been created as a response to the challenge of improving communication between multiple users – over 100 employees who want to book one of the 30 available parking spaces for a defined period of time.
The specification of the application has been created with the needs of its prospective users in mind:
Since the solution allowing for the optimization of the reservation management is an MVP, we also had to face the challenge of assuring further scalability of the product.
The concept of Ginny mobile application was based on an in-depth analysis of our current process. Initially, we had managed 20 parking spaces, each permanently assigned to a given employee. Due to the company’s growth, more and more inquiries about available parking spaces started to appear on various channels, including Slack, Facebook, and direct questions to the HR department.
The in-depth analysis of the reservation process showed us three major issues to tackle. Firstly, many parking spaces were not used efficiently (e.g. they remained empty when their holders weren’t at work). Secondly, only one person in the HR department knew the exact availability of parking spaces. Last but not least, following the company’s expansion, the number of parking spaces increased from 20 to 30. As a result, we had to find the most reasonable and fair way to make the new spots available to all employees.
Being aware of the areas that require optimization, we put together an interdisciplinary team of frontend and backend developers, experienced product designers, and an agile project manager. With an established workflow and well-maintained communication (regular meetings), we clearly defined the goal to be achieved. That’s how we started working on a technically outstanding parking management application.
We decided that 20 parking spaces would remain permanently assigned to a couple of employees and the additional ten should function as spots whose ownership is subject to change. By logging to the Ginny app, employees can easily trace available parking spaces, view available spots, and book them with a simple tap on the screen.
Our product designers had hands full of work with building the mobile application from scratch. Though the visual side was mostly based on Merixstudio’s corporate identity, we wanted to adjust is to the freshest trends in mobile application design. Thus, we went for minimalism and used intense contrasting colors along with smooth layout animations.
As far as the tech stack is concerned, we have decided to use Flutter as one of the best cross-platform solutions for modern, top-notch mobile applications. We’ve also chosen the highly-performance Go, Python, and Flask framework to build a functional MVP fast and facilitate quick iteration after every feedback cycle.
A user without an assigned permanent parking space can book one of the “free” spots every day. When there are no more available spaces, they can send a request to the employees with assigned permanent parking spaces to free them up.
Employees with assigned permanent parking spaces can temporarily free up their spot for a given period of time. This can be done by transferring the space to a specific person or putting it into the bank of unassigned spaces for a selected period.
The fully autonomous app monitors the parking lot and spaces in real-time and displays their statuses to all users.
To get access to the Ginny app, users log in with their Slack accounts. The parking space is booked with one tap.
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