Enes Gundogdu
Product Designer
BERMWOOD / WALGREENS / ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE
A clearer answer.
Designing an AI-assisted app to help drivers understand parking restrictions, check the details, and decide what to do next.
MY ROLE
Lead UX/UI Designer
Information architecture, flows, UI, design system, components and prototypes
TEAM
Bermwood
Working with product leadership and engineering
FIRST LAUNCH
January 2022
Nine months of initial design and development
FIG. 01 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
The Walgreens transaction workspace
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
01 Product overview: property context, deal information, documents and next actions in a historical Walgreens screen.
01 The Problem
Reading the sign is easy. Knowing what it means is harder.
One parking spot can come with several rules. The answer may change with the time, the vehicle, or whether the driver has a permit.
Drivers need to make that decision quickly. A missed condition can mean a fine, while uncertainty can send them looking for another space. ParkAid was designed around a practical question: can I park here, under these conditions?
Rules overlap
01
Hours, permits and vehicle restrictions can appear together on the same sign.
Time is limited
02
Drivers need useful guidance without spending several minutes decoding the wording.
Mistakes have a cost
03
A confident answer is only helpful if the driver can understand the conditions behind it.
02 Understanding Drivers
Clarity was only half of the challenge.
The research described in the project covered interviews, surveys and observations of drivers reading parking signs.
The findings pointed to three connected needs: a quick answer, guidance that considers the driver's situation, and a way to understand how the app reached its answer. Interest in AI did not remove concerns about its accuracy.
Interviews
Explore how drivers interpret restrictions and what makes them hesitate.
Surveys
Understand reported confusion, time pressure and concerns about parking fines.
Contextual inquiry
Observe the task where it happens, with real signs and competing demands.
WHAT THIS MEANT FOR THE DESIGN
A short answer needed an explanation behind it. Drivers should be able to check the rule, not just accept the result.
02 The Problem
High-value portfolios were being managed through outdated workflows.
Commercial real estate teams relied on spreadsheets, legacy systems, email chains and disconnected tools to manage important work.
Property information, lease details, proposals and supporting documents could sit in different places. Teams had to piece together the context before making a decision or moving a transaction forward.
Understand the asset
Finding the right record meant moving between tools. It was harder to see how a property, its lease and an active transaction were connected.
Slow approvals and repeated admin
Email-based coordination made progress harder to follow. Teams had to chase decisions, repeat updates and check who needed to act next.
Limited portfolio visibility
Disconnected records made it harder to maintain a clear view of the portfolio and know which information was current.
10,000+
Stores in the client portfolio
$2.8B+
Annual client rent expenses
Walgreens’ operating scale at the January 2022 launch. These figures describe the client portfolio, rather than product users or savings.
THE DESIGN QUESTION
My contribution was to organise the information, translate business rules into interactions and develop reusable interfaces with the team. The initial build and the later extensions were collaborative efforts across product and engineering.
02 UNDERSTANDING DRIVERS
Clarity was only half of the challenge.
Real estate teams needed to move between properties, leases, proposals, documents and approvals while keeping the context of each decision clear.
Velocity brought this work into a shared platform. For Walgreens, that meant designing for a national portfolio and people with different responsibilities, including brokers, transaction managers and administrators.
10,000+
Stores in the client portfolio
$2.8B+
Annual client rent expenses
Walgreens’ operating scale at the January 2022 launch. These figures describe the client portfolio, rather than product users or savings.
THE DESIGN QUESTION
My contribution was to organise the information, translate business rules into interactions and develop reusable interfaces with the team. The initial build and the later extensions were collaborative efforts across product and engineering.
02 PORTFOLIO DISCOVERY
Start with the properties that matter.
The first task was often narrowing a large estate to a relevant working portfolio.
The Walgreens designs combined search, region and state filters, map and list views, and a distinction between All Properties and My Properties. A guided customisation flow helped users define their relevant part of the portfolio before entering the broader environment.
Users
Velocity supported users with very different priorities.
Portfolio Managers
needed oversight across assets and renewals
Finance Teams
required accurate obligations and reporting
Deal Teams
needed fast transaction workflows
Leadership
needed clear performance visibility
The challenge was designing one product that worked for all of them.
DESIGN APPROACH
These patterns served different needs: filters narrowed the dataset, the map provided location context, and personal views kept an individual’s area of responsibility close at hand.
02 Portfolio customisation alongside filtered results. Show region/state selection and the distinction between All Properties and My Properties.
02 PORTFOLIO DISCOVERY
Start with the properties that matter.
The first task was often narrowing a large estate to a relevant working portfolio.
The Walgreens designs combined search, region and state filters, map and list views, and a distinction between All Properties and My Properties. A guided customisation flow helped users define their relevant part of the portfolio before entering the broader environment.
DESIGN APPROACH
Keep portfolio-wide visibility available, while giving users a practical way to work within their own scope.
These patterns served different needs: filters narrowed the dataset, the map provided location context, and personal views kept an individual’s area of responsibility close at hand.
FIG. 02 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
From a national estate to a relevant portfolio
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
02 Portfolio customisation alongside filtered results. Show region/state selection and the distinction between All Properties and My Properties.
03 PROPERTY & TRANSACTIONS
Keep the context. Make the work actionable.
A property was more than a record. It was the starting point for related real estate work.
I organised property information into grouped sections and contextual navigation, with related leases, transactions and documents accessible from the property workspace. The aim was to preserve the connection between the asset and the work happening around it.
Transactions needed their own structure
Rent reductions, lease restructures, subleases and dispositions have different information needs. The transaction designs brought together deal information, team members, documents and proposals, with dedicated My Transactions and My Approvals views for task-oriented work.
PROPERTY CONTEXT
Understand the asset
Location, property details, leases and related documents.
TRANSACTION CONTEXT
Understand the decision
Deal information, proposals, supporting documents and approvals.
FIG. 03 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
Property context → transaction detail
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
03 Pair the property workspace with a transaction overview. Annotate how navigation keeps related information connected.
Designing for configurable information
Early requirements called for administrators to define transaction fields, including names, types, options and ordering. This introduced two connected experiences: configuring the information and completing the resulting form.
The design challenge was to preserve a consistent structure while allowing transaction-specific detail. Proposal requirements also included copying an existing proposal, so users could develop a related scenario from an existing starting point.
These are documented requirements and design explorations; the confirmed first launch does not establish that every configuration feature shipped.
04 LEARNING FROM USE
Defaults should help. They should also adapt.
Broker feedback revealed a small interaction with an important contextual difference.
After launch, Walgreens users were training on the Broker Opinion of Value module. Its demographic table used distances such as one, two and three miles. Those ranges did not suit every location: a dense area like New York City could need a quarter mile, half a mile and one mile.
MY PROPOSAL
Let brokers edit the distance values directly in the table, retaining useful defaults and avoiding an additional editing step.
The first suggestion was a separate edit button. I questioned the need for that extra step and offered to develop both approaches for comparison. The team supported exploring direct editing, provided the interface made editability clear.
FIG. 04 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
One table. Different local contexts.
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
04 Show the default distance ranges and the proposed editing states. Compare direct editing with the separate edit interaction.
The exchange confirms the proposal and team agreement. The final shipped interaction and its effect on task time are not confirmed.
05 LATER PRODUCT EVOLUTION
Make the approval logic visible before it runs.
Transaction approvals could follow different routes. A single fixed sequence would not represent the business rules.
After the initial launch, we began designing a configurable workflow tool for Walgreens transaction approvals. Requirements included serial, parallel, either/or and committee approvals.
I asked how users would configure these structures, drew flows and recorded questions as I worked. With engineering, I explored a graphical editor using connected nodes, draggable steps and a dialog or side panel for step settings.
DESIGN APPROACH
Show the route and its individual steps together, so the configuration of one decision remains understandable within the whole process.
Changes to one step could affect other parts of the route. I worked on components and interaction foundations before bringing the flows together, then refined them through development feedback and Figma comments. Development had started by July 2022.
FIG. 05 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
The route and the rules behind each step
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
05 Approval canvas paired with step configuration. Show a real route and explain the people, conditions and relationships between steps.
This was a post-launch extension. It is separate from the initial nine-month delivery.
06 INTERNAL WORK / PUBLIC DISCOVERY
Two experiences. One connected property story.
In 2023, the work extended from internal listing management in Velocity to Walgreens’ public property pages.
The team prioritised the internal changes first. I clarified upload requirements, saving behaviour and how image editing would fit the tool chosen by engineering.
01
Check the upload rule
This flow did not require a document type, even though the existing document library normally did.
02
Make saving explicit
Listing edits needed a clear Save Changes action, confirmed with the team.
03
Support comparison
I proposed a temporary, account-free shortlist for people exploring several properties.
The public pages changed direction during delivery, returning to the existing Walgreens site and its visual style. I adapted the designs, and later addressed minor suggestions following positive client feedback.
FIG. 06 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
Managing a listing. Exploring a property.
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
06 Internal listing editor and public search/detail pages. Label the account-free shortlist as a proposal.
The shortlist was supported for discussion with development; implementation is not confirmed.
07 DESIGN & DELIVERY
Consistency lives in the details.
Reusable patterns helped connect the experience as the product grew.
My work moved from flows and wireframes into interface design, components and prototypes. Figma designs and style guides supported engineering handoff, with implementation questions resolved together.
A pre-launch display-resolution issue made the importance of that collaboration tangible. I updated the layouts; engineering began applying the changes and asked which other pages and components were covered. The handoff needed to explain the scope of the change as well as the screen itself.
Two distinct interface foundations
The internal Velocity application used reusable patterns for its working interfaces. The later Walgreens public UI file had its own component families, including buttons, inputs, filters, property cards and listing sections, with variants for different interaction states.
Keeping those contexts clear mattered: internal transaction work and public property browsing had different tasks and interface requirements.
FIG. 07 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
From early structure to reusable patterns
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
07 An early wireframe and final screen, followed by selected components and states. Label internal Velocity and public Walgreens components separately.
08 LAUNCH & REFLECTION
From the first release to everyday work.
Walgreens went live on 17 January 2022, following nine months of initial team work.
JANUARY 2022
First launch
Project correspondence confirmed the launch and a smooth first few weeks.
FEBRUARY 2022
Positive client response
Leadership relayed positive broker and Walgreens real estate team feedback.
AFTER LAUNCH
Continued evolution
Valuation feedback, configurable approvals and later listing requirements shaped further design work.
FIG. 08 / IMAGE PLACEHOLDER
The launched Walgreens experience
Reserved for original project screens
WALGREENS · VELOCITY
08 Use a screen from the launched Walgreens platform to close the story with the delivered product.
What I took from the work
The most useful questions were often practical ones: can this value change, what happens after an approval, does this upload need a type, and when is an edit saved? Clarifying those rules helped turn specialist requirements into understandable interactions.
After launch, I proposed interviews once users had enough experience with the platform. For future work, I would build direct user access and measurement into the delivery plan earlier, assessing task success, completion time and support needs alongside client feedback.
WALGREENS / VELOCITY