Designing hardware UX under real-world physical constraints. Kiosk interaction design looks simple until you account for the actual environment: direct sunlight washing out screens, users in motion with limited dwell time, gloved hands, accessibility requirements, and hardware enclosure constraints that limit what's physically possible. The key decision was to treat every interaction as a constraint-satisfaction problem — not "what's the ideal flow" but "what's the most reliable flow given everything that can go wrong in a parking lot at 10pm." This led to deliberately simplified interaction models that prioritized error recovery and transaction completion over elegance.

Unifying physical and digital systems as a single design problem. The temptation in hardware-software projects is to treat them as parallel workstreams — a hardware team and a software team — and reconcile at the end. I pushed for a unified architecture from the start, which meant the kiosk interaction model, the payment flow, and the operator dashboard were all designed as parts of the same system. The practical impact was that operators experienced consistent data, consistent language, and consistent mental models whether they were looking at a physical device or a web dashboard — which directly supported adoption and reduced support overhead.

Building for operators, not just end users. The natural design instinct in consumer-facing products is to optimize for the end user — the parker. But Pied Parker's core customer is the property operator. Early on I made a deliberate decision to invest as heavily in the operator-facing dashboard as in the consumer-facing kiosk, specifically in real-time visibility and reconciliation workflows. This turned out to be a competitive differentiator: operators chose and stayed with the platform not just because the kiosks worked, but because they could actually see and manage what was happening across their properties.