sitting in my car in a Seattle parking lot. there's a knock on my window. it's an old lady, who asks me "how do we pay for parking?"
she's taking her husband to the hospital to see his doctor, but there's a massive road project that has cut off access for months, no end in sight, so she's parked a few blocks away. almost every parking lot in town removed their pay stations years ago. she has a smartphone but no idea how to handle this situation.
she never would have figured it out. her words, and I don't doubt her.
the lot has three signs hung up with instructions on how to pay, because every single lot in town supports one to five different competing parking lot apps. there's one sign that says you can use Park Mobile, and gives a lot ID, and then on another wall there's a sign that says you can use PayByPhone, with a different lot ID, and then there's a huge sign with a QR code that encourages you to Scan Here To Park, as if it's the official primary method for doing so. It is not, it's just another app.
I've scanned these before and gotten an "Instant App." I figure this is minimal friction for this person, so I suggest she do so. she pulls up a QR Scanner app - either because she's been bamboozled into believing that's the only way to get QR support, or because her particular Android phone actually does not have it built into the camera for God knows what reason; I didn't have time to figure out which.
at first she struggles to figure out how to change cameras, but this turns out to be only because she's used to every camera app opening with the front facing selected by default; it has actually selected the rear camera, so I help her get it aimed right, and it goes bleep, and then... pops up an ad. i have to stop her before she hits open on whatever sludge is trying to put itself on her device
then we get a screen with 30 different elements on it describing different qualities of the QR code. the most prominent is a "Search The Web" button, which would have dumped the scanned URL into Google for some reason and produced irrelevant results; i have to direct her to tap the tiny blue link.
that link opens Instant App. Google play prints a huge permissions message; I direct her to accept it. it installs a 16mb app; so what was the point of Instant here, exactly?
well, that's moot anyway, because as soon as it opens, it asks for permission, and then simply installs the normal version of the app, 24mb.
we get into that. it asks for the street address of the lot. I have never seen this information printed on any parking lot in my life. it suggests several "nearby" options; they are actually half a mile away.
unable to figure this conundrum out even for myself, i sigh and walk her through installing Park Mobile, which I know works. i help her find the lot ID. it asks for duration. she picks two hours. it asks for payment. she gets out her CC and types in the info.
proceeding to checkout, it then... selects google pay. even though she just put in a CC. she hits proceed, and i go "is that the right card?" and she double takes and goes "...no." i maybe just saved this woman from losing $30 in overdrafts.
I direct her to tap the payment options field. nothing. i sigh. "I'm sorry, it looks like you have to tap that tiny pencil icon in the CORNER of the field." yep. finally she's able to select her credit card. she hits proceed.
it now pops up the duration selector again. what???? why????? it's back at the default of 1 hour, and she tries to pick two again, but it just won't do it. I happen to know this UI pretty well, so I know that if parking time was actually limited to 1 hour, it wouldn't show the option at all. This is just completely glitched out.
with no other options, she just picks one hour, and successfully pays. we both breathe a sigh of relief, and I advise her that if she needs more time, she should be able to just tap a button in the app to extend her parking. I really hope it actually works like I described.
throughout all this we had to grant Location permissions at least three times, and each time you have to decide between three options, none of which are "Yes." the one you want is "while the app is open" but there is no way to know this, and nobody alive has ever picked either of the other options. nobody would.
i have struggled to write an ending to this post three times. words genuinely fail me.
