Digital Door Sign Comments and Feedback

Following are comments and feedback on the design and implementation which might eventually be implemented, but are beyond the scope of the initial design. (We will collect these; and at some point sort them into "critical" vs. "nice-to-have").

• 2019-09-04: Lawrence suggests, if we can put physical smart-phones mounted outside our offices, we can offer a button the visitor can push to contact the away staff-person; depending on the staff-person's settings, and what we're able to implement, we could:
  • alert the staff-person- to remind them to update their out-of-date "back" information.
  • record an audio or video message for the staff-person
  • set up live two-way contact on a video or voice call (would require avoiding the system being exploited by bored hall-wanderers).
• 2019-10-24: Lawrence suggests including a photo on the public page
• 2019-10-25: Lori suggests the bookmarkable URL for "add n minutes" needs security. Either behind auth'n or with an unguessable URL.
  • I assumed it would be behind the login- but is that still easy enough to mash with one finger on your phone...
• 2019-10-25: Lori suggests "Away" should turn the page background red, and "Here" should be green. Or some other immediately obvious colour-coding.
• 2019-11-19: Demo to FAST group.
  • Mirko suggests implementing a "progressive web app" for phones; which would allow it to a) appear as a web-app and not a webpage; b) run offline with cache updates until online; c) do push notifications for, eg., "you said you'd be back at your office now; do you want to update your timing?"
  • Can we have a "group" page, which could be a dashboard for everyone in the area?
  • We can use the app's API to feed data to scinage pages.
  • Stephen suggests avatar photos could be via gravatars (globally recognized avatars, automatically associated with your email address)
• 2019-12-30: Daniel notes: this application would contribute to campus accessibility.
  • The campus's new Accessibility Training advises that our Customer Service Standard includes providing advance notice if services are not available.
  • They give an example of someone making considerable effort to visit an office for a routine task, only to discover a note on the door saying they were unavailable.
  • If we do deploy this, a followup task will be how to integrate with our standard customer service information.
  • This is another good reason to roll this out campus-wide, not just for Computer Science.