Human-Computer Interaction in Study Room Reservation Systems

Study rooms provide a key resource for college students. However, many study spaces require reservations ahead of time to manage high demand. A reservation system serves to control the flow and population of a building to limit interaction during a global pandemic. Existing solutions display a lack of user-friendliness that inhibits students’ ability to schedule time in a room, effectively restricting them from this resource. This either occurs as a result of using cost-effective but inefficient tools, or as a result of poor design in a proprietary tool. To address these problems, a prototype of a new interface was developed to bring the idea of the personal scheduling assistant to study room reservation. Historical reservation data from the Zachry Event Management System was gathered to analyze trends and conducted surveys to identify the most important factors in scheduling for a student user. After developing the application and prototypes of existing solutions, a user story was conducted to evaluate and compare this prototype solution to existing solutions. The proposed solution succeeded at its goal: to be a better browsing solution than current systems. While it was not the favorite in all cases, participants found the gradient availability easy to interpret and its weekly view useful for scheduling. The existing solution that showed availability by room and time was simulated in this user study and held strong favor with participants due to clarity and familiarity. This study shows that there is definite potential in integrating more browsing features into scheduling systems. Combined with the accepted, detailed implementation, the proposed and tested solution improves the reservation experience

Availability bars for calendar scheduling

ACM 1-59593-298-4/06/0004