What is the right speed range for a car in a parking garage?

An exercise in user centered thinking

Harpreet Singh
3 min readJan 31, 2020
Photo by Aaron Lutas on Unsplash

What is the right speed for driving a car in a car parking lot? What is the acceptable speed range that we should be driving in a car park?

Is it 8, 15, 22 mph?

Coming to think of it — Who thinks about the user experience of driving through a parking garage?

These questions were on my mind as I joined a line of drivers behind a person driving 8 mph in the parking lot — a bit frustrated and angry. Last night, on the other hand, a car driving at 22 mph in the same parking lot scared me as I had but a second to swerve out of its way.

Back to my thinking — Who designs the UX for the garage and why did this person decide not to put a dividing line through the entire parking lot?

Recently, the San Jose 4th street car parking garage upgraded the experience of the car park garage. There is a new fancy led gate that lights up green or red as it scans your badge.

Seemingly, the old analog gate was not good enough!

A UX person must have designed the new gate after deliberating on the best value to bring to the end users. There must have been product management involved, a business case, outsourcing to China — a…

--

--