User Stories

How we use Reservations (from the media tech perspective)

Currently (06-02) media techs working in the Equipment Loan Office use Reservations to check out and check in equipment for (typically) art school students. The process looks something like this:

Check-in

• Look up the patron's account with the Find User function
• Visually inspect equipment and match up barcode with the number displayed
• Checkbox by the item barcode
• Perform other tasks that might be necessary (eg, confirm charging unit is present, inspect lens, etc.) and checkbox all of those boxes
• Finally, check in the equipment

Check-out/Reservation

• Barcode-scan the item into the Reservations search box (or find it by typing in the item name)
• Wait for search to process and search results page to load
• Click on the first result
• Click add-to-cart
• Repeat for all items the patron wants to check out until cart is fully loaded
• Enter their netID in the Reserving For field
• Enter dates they want to reserve for
• Click make reservation
• Get mad when reservations doesn't register the user nor the dates
• Re enter the information and click make reservation until it works
• Take advantage of the MT accounts' ability to override all errors, especially when given nonsensical errors involving phantom equipment or irrelevant dates
• Hit finalize reservation
• Rescan barcode or select the correct code from the item dropdown
• Inspect equipment and check off the correct boxes
• Hit check out

Editing Reservations

Occasionally a patron will want to come in and renew some equipment that can't be "officially" renenewed, or maybe changes her mind or whatever after check out on the dates. In this case the MT usually will have to manually go through each item's reservation page and edit it, one by one

Wrap-up

This is about all I have experience doing; it'd be better to talk to Chris Medeiros or an Eq-Spec about some more specific uses of the app. (especially more advanced administration; adding/removing items, etc. I have no idea how that is). For me, the main 'thing' that could be improved would be to simply condense the checkout process to fewer steps. Possible solution:

• Some kind of fast-checkout box that takes the item barcode as its main argument and automatically adds the item to the cart (or, if the item is not available, flashes some kind of pop or redirects to the item page). Prepopulate the checkout fields with the specific item barcode.
• Similarly, or in conjunction, if the checkout date is today, assume that the item isn't being reserved but being checked out.
• when in "checkout mode" in the above 2 scenarios, there is no need for a "finalize reservation" screen and simply go straight to the checkout/inspect items.
• the current use for the finalize reservation screen is to double check the dates and user are correct. however, this is mainly only important because the cart doesn't work well and doesn't register the user or dates. so if that latency issue was fixed then the 'finalize reservation' screen isn't so necessary
• finalize screen is still a good idea for actual reservations

Basically, currently the checkout process inovolves making a reservation for that item and then checking it out. It would be awesome to combine these two steps into a more fluid checkout procedure. As of now it's just kinda clunky (but well, it works.)