Once term got up and running, we imagined that users would become more familiar with the building layout, and have less use for the navigational aspects of the kiosk.
I had already been doing some preliminary exploration of creating an at-a-glance webpage that would give users a feeling for how busy the Library building was in real-time. My thought was to create a dashboard showing the current availability of services:
- How full was the building?
- How many PCs were free?
- Whether there were any available study rooms
- How many laptops were available for borrowing?
Access to our library involves climbing up several dozen steps: so I was planning a web page that would give people a sense of whether it was worth coming over and climbing up an Aztec temple's worth of stairs.
This sort of real-time information struck me as potentially useful on the kiosk. True - I wasn't going to save anyone the steps - but I could make it immediately clear when they walked through the front door how busy they were likely to find our services.
I started to add my experimental features to the monolith.
First of all, I added a prominent bar that showed how many people were in the building. This was something that had been available to staff for years, and relied on a simple call to our entry management system.
A quick win for me, as it reused existing code: this feature was welcomed straight away.
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