Lauren Beatty is tackling an issue almost all Edmonton residents deal with: seasonal parking bans. The fourth-year Bachelor of Design student is working with the City of Edmonton on her DESN 410 capstone project, which aims to improve messaging about when residents need to move their vehicles, and where they can safely park when the bans occur.

Last year, the City launched a service where registered users receive notifications 24 hours prior to parking bans so they can ensure they move their vehicles and avoid ticketing or towing. Beatty spent the Fall term researching issues in the system’s usability, as well as public awareness of its existence.

“A lot of people just don't know this service exists,” she says. “Since they’re not aware of it, they don't know when parking bans happen. They don't move their cars off the street, which makes it harder for the crews to clear the snow.”

She’s spent the last couple of months doing literature reviews, analyzing user feedback, collecting survey responses and performing heuristic analyses of websites offering similar notifications. The current system utilizes both texts and emails to reach users, but Beatty says there’s a lot of room for improvement. As she embarks on the application stages for her capstone project, she aims to provide the City with a range of recommendations to improve the experience based on the findings from her research.

“In my literature review, I found that notifications are most beneficial when they have personalization and customization based on user preferences,” she says. “The other main finding was timeliness – a lot of users just aren't receiving notifications at all, or they're getting them too early or too late.”

She notes that sometimes the schedule sent out in the notifications differed from what could be found on the online road-clearing map, so users were left confused about which dates were correct. Beatty also says that the difference between bans for arterial and residential streets is often unclear, meaning that people don’t know which notifications apply to them.

Throughout the Winter term, she’ll be working closely with the City to consider these improvements for the notification service. She plans to share how the City might redesign and personalize the messages, improve navigation on the website and create a social media campaign to increase awareness about the service.

“I've taken a wide variety of classes ranging from print design to digital experience design where I have learned a lot of valuable design and research skills. In this capstone class I've been able to apply these skills to assess problems and generate ideas and solutions at a scale that was not possible in my previous classes,” she says. “Dr. Isabelle Sperano has helped me so much. I don't think I would have been able to do this project without her. She's been so good with guiding me and giving me support and ideas.”

Though parking bans are an issue that affects Edmonton mostly during the winter months, Beatty sees the possibilities of using the notification service for other information down the line.

“It could be used for alerts for city-wide events, like if there's a marathon or something happening and roads are blocked,” Beatty says. “Everyone has a little bit of experience with notifications like Amber Alerts or weather updates, but these ones would be very specific to Edmonton, and I think they'd be super helpful.”

Josh Koehli, manager of service design with the City of Edmonton, says the city is continually improving services and always looking to incorporate Edmontonians' feedback. "Allowing students to get practical experience in applying their service design skills not only provides us with valuable insights, but it also supports the pipeline of talent for improving government services."