“Who never experiences those horribles parking machines? You never know where to introduce your ticket, your money. Hopefully, you are here to make it better!”

I decided to design a pay and display parking machine rather than the type where you take a token and pay at the end.

I thought about the last time I used a pay and display parking machine, and I tried to relive those frustrations. At the time I tried to pay using a mobile phone and credit card, which wasn’t particularly fun and I wouldn't recommend it.

I mapped out the typical user journey for a basic parking machine:

This example was for a coin-only machine, so I thought about designing a machine which took cards as well.

User journey for coin / card machine:

I did some Google research into existing parking machines, to see which layouts were easy to understand and which were confusing.

I noticed that in pretty much every example the layout was very crowded and there were different sized slots all over the place, adding to the confusion. Also there seemed to be no logical order to how the the slots were laid out.

For my design I aimed to use as few words as possible, focusing instead on icons so that language was not a barrier to using the machine.

I sketched out my design which was based on the user journey I thought about earlier.

There were 3 main sections to guide people:

1 - choosing the number of hours and confirming

2 - entering your payment as either coins, notes or card (Pin not required)

3 - taking your ticket and change if applicable

Here is my final design:

In a real world situation I would test this design with several users, by asking them to imagine they were using the machine in different scenarios (coins, card, etc) and to speak aloud what they were doing, what their interpretations of the buttons were, and what they expected to happen at each stage.

This could even be done with a paper prototype, before jumping into creating a hi-fidelity design.