user experience: Basic ideas
Questions to be answered:
- Is it necessary to have a login? Without login, the booking process can be greatly simplified. I think login is not necessary because users will have to show their UID to security personnels anyways to verify it's them.
- Then, how are the users going to confirm that they have made a reservation? they can receive an email or they can type in a 4-digit password and their UID to see what reservation they have made.
- How are security officers/admin going to check the reservations made? I have to make a separate page for them to view the current reservation status.
The way I think it should be
- The first page must be showing what the users want the most: the current booking status of facilities for today/tomorrow? No. Things that I wanted to see the most is 'is the music room not booked from X pm to Y pm on the date Z?". And date Z is based on the regulation (something like booking of facilities is only available before 3 days of actual usage).
- For this reason, I think the first page should clearly show, for each room, for which segments of time the room is (un)available for booking. Not for all the rooms just in one page, but it would be like separate menus in one page, so just like something like this:
- And the menus would be, you know, room A, room B, and room C for example. And the content would obviously be the times the room is (un)available. When the user pushes to left or right, the room selection would change.
- The date/time selection must be smart as well. For example, it should be smart enough to focus the initial position at the current time, not at the earliest booking time of today (which might have passed already). And the time selection (from morning to afternoon) must be vertically scrolled, not horizontally, because users are more accustomed to scrolling down (think of Facebook/Instagram/any online shopping websites...)
- There are four colleges total in Lungwah (officially named Jockey Club Student Village III, http://www.jockeyv3.hku.hk), but there is NO need to specify which college a student is from. University number will tell me that anyways, so doing so will only complicate the booking process. But wait, different colleges have different rooms and arrangements for them. This means maybe I should set the very first page (index.html) as choosing the college the student is from? Yes.
Required user information
- University number
- 4-digit arbitrary password that he/she may use when he/she wants to confirm the booking made on the website.