Review Sei's Feedback

[orenyk]

Dear Reservations Team,

Casey suggested that I test the development version of Reservations. I have detailed my system configuration and have listed my observations below.

System Configuration

Apple MacBook Pro, Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013
2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Chrome Extensions Enabled Within Reservations

Adblock
Ghostery
Google Dictionary
Page Load Time
PageSpeed Insights (by Google)
Zotero Connector

Observations

• Reservations v3.3.0's catalog page loads in approximately 8.5 seconds in Google Chrome 35.0.1916.153. v3.2.0's catalog page loads in approximately 6 seconds. (I have used the Page Load Time extension to measure this data.)
• While the new spinning icon is a useful visual indicator for requesting users to wait, I believe that:
  • A text indicator would assist users in clearly understanding that the Reservations software is busy, e.g. "Please wait..."
  • The visual indicator should be more visible. The icon is off on the top-right corner of My Cart box, which does not seem intuitive to me.
  • The green boxes in the Equipment Models page do not display sufficient visual information to warrant no descriptions. I was confused as to what function the boxes had before testing.
  • Based on prior experience with box indicators, I assumed that I could drag my cursor and select multiple days at once. This does not seem to be the case.
• My Cart box should not be visible on Make Reservations page. I can edit the duration of the checkout in this box, but such edit will not be reflected unless "Make Reservations" button is pressed again.

Addendum: It is difficult to find the Reservations page on Google, despite using the keywords "yale" "media" "checkout". The link reservations.yale.edu/bmec/ does not appear on Google and requires multiple steps to arrive at the page. Even the terms "reservations yale bmec" do not display the page directly. As my peers have indicated, this is troublesome for users who are not familiar with the media checkout process. Could we allow Google's crawler to link the page directly?

We should go through all of this and decide what, if anything, we want to change as a result.

[dgoerger]

• catalogue rendering is already much improved in v3.4, hopefully we'll be able to cut it down even a little bit more.
• I think the spinner on the cart is clear enough, but I defer to UX experts. If we're going to spinner and dim the entire / more of the page, we might as well do an HTML refresh instead of AJAX.
• should we add mouseover text to the Equipment Model calendar dates? Would that be more clear?
• I'm not super familiar with a dragging on boxes to select a date-range, but I think that's tracking in Soup up calendar #701.
• we can definitely discuss hiding the cart on the New Reservation and New Request pages.
• search engines can't find the page until View catalogue / homepage without login #175.

[dgoerger]

please see child issues, resolving this master issue.