Rethinking a room booking system. What would happen if you forgot everything you knew about office booking system sand started from scratch. What would it look like? What features would you add or remove? Does a booking system have to be boring or could it be fun? This is exactly what asked ourselves when we put together a group of people from the office from different departments: Programmers, Creatives and UX designers, with one goal – Let’s build a prototype from a whole new booking system.
GOAL
An internal prototyping project to make people from different departments get a deeper understanding of their co-workers skills. And to show that if we work together, across departments we can develop amazing work.
PROBLEM
Booking systems in offies have looked the same forever. It’s almost like they have not been developed by someone that worked in an office. What if we questioned everything and started from scratch.
IDEA / INNOVATION
We build a new booking system prototype from scratch. We created a new interface, new design, build new devices and created new functions.
Three Units
01 The Display
The touch display is mounted outside of each room. It lets you know if theroom is booked or not and enables you to quickly book a room in one tap. Visually we wanted to make it easy to understand if the room was available or not, even if you were standing 10 ft away from the room – Using the word FREE in green and BOOKED in red bold letters. FREE / BOOKED are the default stage that are always displayed. But by tapping the screen you can dive deeper into a calendar and see availability for the upcoming days and weeks, just like a regular booking system.
02 The Nudgebox
The ‘Nudgebox’ is a box that is placed inside the conference room on the table and it’s connected to the outside display. It has many features, but the main role of the box was to create a way for people outside the room to communicate with the people inside the room without disturbing them and also to help people in the meeting to wrap things up in time to create more productive meetings.
The Nudgebox comes in many shapes and forms. In the example above it’s a triangle – and the shape determines the name of the conference room. Creating a branding systems around shapes, like Oval, Diamiond, Circle, Cube and so on.
03 The Sensor
The Sensor in mounted inside the conference room and enables the system to identify movement. By connecting The Sensor the “Room” can make smart decisions by itself. For example, the room can cancel a booking if it senses that no one is there and make it available for other to use. Another feature could be that the sensor notices that only 1 person out of four is there for the meeting and can send out an automatic reminder to people that are late to the meeting. By connecting sensors from different rooms the Room can recommend a different room that is available if you are trying to book a room that is already in use.
Room Pirate Mode
The ‘Room Pirate‘ graphics is displayed outside the room, when a room is not booked – but the sensor spots that there are people in the room. Showing the people outside that even tho the room is full of people, the room is in fact not booked and up for grabs.
The Nudgebox
The Nudgebox is connected to both the Sensor and the display outside the room.
FEATURES:
01. The Nudgebox are filled with LED-lights and can create a visual countdown to help people that are in the meeting to get an understanding for how much time they have left in the meeting.
02. It’s equipped with a speaker and people on the outside can nudge people on the inside with a subtle audio reminder that their meeting is due.
03. The shape of the Nudgebox comes in many shapes. Since the shape of the box is also the name of the room it helps meeting participants identify where they are.
Audio Nudge.
The Nudgebox Speaker gives a subtle nudge that someone on the outside wants to get in. Choose a preferred nudge-sound like a Violin, Pig sound, Snoring or a Horn on the display and tap the icon.
‘Quick extension’ is a neat feature that makes it easier for you to quickly extend a meeting. if you need an extra 10 minutes to wrap things up – just press the button on the Nudgebox. If the room in available it extends your booking.
The Sensor
The Yanzi sensor is mounted inside the room and identifies movement. If someone is in the room, but haven’t booked the sensors sends a signal to the display on the outside and the word “Room Pirate” appears.
Letting other people know that this room is available. The sensor also cancels room bookings if it doesn’t detect any movement within 10 minutes.
The sensor can make smart automatic decisions and streamline bookings and make sure that all conference rooms are used in the smartest way possible.
