feedback from user survey

[aschloegl]

A colleague of mine did a user survey after we migrated from v1.2 to v2.2, and came up with 12 issues. The users were from our bioimaging group which have a rather large number (27) of resources. Most items could be easily solved. The following items remain, I'll forward them for your consideration:

1) When create/select reservation, it should open not in the same
window, as now, but in the new window, so that overall schedule
remains visible.

The workaround is, of course, to open phpscheduleit twice, such that the reservation and the booked times are visible; the colleague would still prefer a new window that closes automatically when pressing "Ok" or "Cancel".


2) Changing the week by arrows should be implemented at the end of the page as well.

I guess this refers to
.../scheduleit/Web/schedule.php
.../scheduleit/Web/calendar.php


3) Active line is not fully highlighted - would be good for orientation, not to get lost.
(refer to Menu->Schedule->Bookings)

Currently only the name of the resource in the first column is highlighted.


4) Slow compared to previous version.

Obviously, v2.2 requires more resources. We'll probably migrate to a faster server or assign more resources to the VM.


5) Color used to label 'my reservation' should be replaced by other that is brighter or easier to spot.

I changed this to some greenish color with the following patch.

Code:

Index: Web/css/schedule.css
===================================================================
--- Web/css/schedule.css (revision 1631)
+++ Web/css/schedule.css (working copy)
@@ -84,7 +84,8 @@
 }
 
 td.reserved.mine, div.reserved.mine {
- background-color: #6F9BAE;
+ background-color: #2FCB9E;
+ color: #333;
 }

[Nick]

This is great stuff. Couple questions:

1) When create/select reservation, it should open not in the same
window, as now, but in the new window, so that overall schedule
remains visible.

This is interesting. Why are users looking at the schedule while creating a reservation?

4) Slow compared to previous version.

Any specific pages?

[aschloegl]

This is great stuff. Couple questions:

1) When create/select reservation, it should open not in the same
window, as now, but in the new window, so that overall schedule
remains visible.

This is interesting. Why are users looking at the schedule while creating a reservation?

This request came form our scientists for booking microscopes. They need to plan sometimes for long lasting experiments, sometimes booking several resources in consecutive order, or for several days in advance. I've shown them the workaround of opening a second browser window, and it basically comes down to "Users were accustomed to this feature by previous version of booking system so that is the reason why they demand it."

4) Slow compared to previous version.

Any specific pages?

Users say, the new booking system is slow as a whole. I did some profiling and see response times during office hours (in the evening, its faster).
The following pages are examples seem to take
Web/schedule.php: Menu->Schedule->bookings:   2.2 seconds
Web/admin/manage_resources.php: 1.2 s
Web/calendar.php?ct=&d=&m=&y=&sid=3 : 1.4 seconds, this schedule has about 25 resources.

Watching top shows that mysqld is likely to be involved. We have have currently about 12000 reservation instances.

Alois

[Nick]

If you turn on debug logging, you can see some run time metrics for viewing the schedule. The schedule time usually mostly spent rendering all of the data. 25 resources at once is a pretty large amount. I'll see if there's any optimizations I can do.