Pity the poor iPad 1 or the Samsung Galaxy 1. They were the tip of the bleeding edge! a few years ago. Now their time has come and the dustbin beckons.
But like Cobol programmers back when Y2K stalked the land, they may have a use yet.
One of the more peculiar things that I’ve noticed in offices is that there is generally one or two people who know how to schedule a conference room. Part of the reason is that it is behind the nearly impenetrable wall of Outlook. Trying to get anything done in Outlook is an exercise in compromises and disappointments. Unfortunately, this is the office standard, so any solution will have to take into account that aging software.
I’m proposing this: Using old iPads and/or Android tablets to allow scheduling right on the door of the meeting room. These devices have WiFi, Bluetooth and big wonderful multi-touch screens. Let’s use them.
Here’s my list of possible features in this software:
1. List the name of the current room
1a. Tell me if this room is booked
1b. Tell me if this room is free
1c. Tell me if this room is free, when the next meeting is
1d. Let me know if I should NOT enter
2. Give the current time
3. List names of other rooms
3a. Tell me if those rooms are free right now
4. Let me schedule a room for a meeting
4a Let me invite people to the meeting
4b Let me name the meeting
4c Let me set which room the meeting will be in
4d Let me set how long the meeting will run
4e Let me attach an agenda to the meeting invite
5. Let me reschedule a meeting
5a change time
5b change room
6. In the case of meetings that require records, let me record who is present
Here’s the sketch (and I want to emphasize SKETCH. This is in no way an wireframe or functional spec. You want to see examples of those, go to my filing cabinet.)
The default interface would have to change, depending on the situation of the room. If the room is occupied, it would look something like this:
In the above “busy” state, the conference would show the name of the meeting, who is in it, and give the opportunity to change the view to schedule a meeting (via the tabs at the top).
In this sketch, the silhouettes represent actual photos of the people in the meeting, which would ease learning names (a problem I always have at the office). In addition, it allows us to fulfill a requirement for public companies and organizations to keep track of who attended. This can be accomplished by the user tapping their photo as they enter to record that they were present. (this could be a fingerprint scan for super secret James Bond type locations, but I digress.)
In this case, the meeting room is open and there is a notification for when the next meeting will take place. The top row of room name tabs is our entrance into the scheduling function AND uses color coding to show which room is open at the moment. (Yes, red/green is a problem for 8% of users. In the final design I’d probably go with an icon or something. Remember it’s a sketch.)
By tapping on the tab for a room, the widget will bring up the schedule of the room for the day.
The user can easily scroll from day to day tapping the large arrows on the side. A meeting is represented by a blocked out rectangle with the name of the meeting as a label. Those invited are represented by photos of themselves.
To reschedule a meeting, the user needs only to tap/hold onto a meeting to select it, then drag it to the new time slot. Everything else (location, invitees, agenda) would be maintained as is.
To move the meeting to another room, the user need only tap/hold to select it and then drag it onto the tab for the new room, this in turn will bring up the schedule interface of that room, allowing the user to find an open slot for the meeting.
To edit the substance of the meeting (name, invitees, agenda) the user would just have to tap the meeting to bring up the create/edit screen.
This is probably the best interface I can do for creating a meeting with minimal amounts of data entry. The agenda is assumed to be a separate document which can be loaded via WiFi or Bluetooth. The attendees can be invited by dragging them from the bottom list of all employees (within reason) into the invite box. The start and end times are selectable and would bring up the standard iPad or Android time selector. But the meeting name requires a keyboard.
Ideally a keyboard would spring up when needed, or perhaps this could be voice entry if dictation software is usable in the old hardware, but at the moment, a keyboard is it, but considering that all other aspects of a meeting are taken care of without a keyboard, that’s not too shabby.
I am assuming there is a preference panel for this software. There would need to be a panel for adding people to the pool of invitees, which could take advantage of the built in camera (remember each person is represented by a photo and name). Additionally, there would be a preference pane to hook into a calendaring system such as Outlook or iCal, but if there is a calendar server in the same WiFi network, that should be a snap.
If there is no central calendaring system to attach, then the preferences would have to include the option of adding rooms, defining the size, and which hardware is keeping the data (or if they will distribute it equally).
UX UNbound 