Project Overview

For the Parco app (by SWARCO), the goal was to (re)design a seamless, scalable, and intuitive digital product experience that empowers users to find, navigate, and pay for parking digitally, while helping municipalities reduce traffic congestion, emissions, and optimise urban parking infrastructure.

Problem Statement

Drivers waste time and fuel searching for parking due to fragmented systems across streets, garages, and private lots. This leads to stress, traffic, and emissions. Cities lack integrated tools for managing parking, payments, and mobility data. A unified, digital solution is needed – one that offers real-time availability, cashless payments, and collects actionable insights to optimise traffic flow and infrastructure planning.

Research & Analysis

Main tools used to get to the core of users/municipalities and business needs:

• UX Audits – looking on a granular level internally at PARCO app, and externally at the main competitors.

• Key Stakeholder Interviews – urban drivers with different degree of experience, city ops, SWARCO business strategy and product leads, devs, and (partner) ParkHere business intelligence team.

• Analysis – looking at the main German cities’ current parking solutions.

• Benchmark – cross-industry for parallel markets inspiration.

Key Challenges & Insights

Today’s parking ecosystem is fragmented and frustrating: drivers lack real-time availability, many still rely on cash or physical machines, and have no time flexibility or reminders during sessions this leads to last-minute searching, stress, traffic jams, and fines. For cities, that inefficiency compounds into higher congestion and emissions, underused infrastructure (parking lots, EV spots), poor forecasting, and costly in-person enforcement, while disconnected systems prevent end-to-end visibility. At the same time, parking apps face their own challenges: the journey is too complex or too bare, friction drives low adoption and user drop-off (lost revenue), and solutions remain hard to scale across multiple municipalities.

Main pain points:

• No real-time info

• Poor UX payment process

• No reminders/time extension

• Lot manager physical presence

• More traffic gems

• Specific areas with higher CO₂ emissions

• Little planning and forecasting capabilities

Solutions

Drivers outcome

The experience was built around speed and certainty: live updates through sensor-integrated maps, one-tap digital and mobile payments, and a fully cashless, app-based flow. Smart session management let users start, stop, extend, and receive notifications effortlessly, while predictive guidance and routing optimization helped them get to the right spot faster.

Cities outcome

The platform enabled smarter routing and reduced search time, helping lower CO₂ output, while bringing road, garage, EV, and private parking into one integrated system. With centralised usage data and real-time management dashboards, teams could remotely monitor operations and support digital enforcement, all within a scalable setup designed for multi-city mobility integration.

Product outcome

The goal was to simplify the experience with seamless UX across all touchpoints, while enabling a flexible billing and subscription model that fit different needs. A delightful, branded interface helped boost trust and confidence, and a modular system ensured the solution can adapt smoothly to each municipality.