Feedback about study rooms
[asked 3/30/2022]
Just some ideas for study room reservations. I don’t know all the security or IT implications here, but it seems to me like the card swipe system could be leveraged to ensure that (1) the right reserver is admitted to the room at their allotted time and (2) if they don’t show up within say 20 minutes then the room becomes available again. The rooms would be available to all by default but you’d get an email asking you to reserve if you walked in. The swipes could even help with contact tracing (if needed). Point is, the reservation and access systems could talk better to each other. Second, I think the amount of time one can reserve a room is a bit long by default. Now that we’re in person, I think it’s more likely that most needs are for an hour meeting rather than a four hour block. Changing the default could cut down on mistaken bookings for too long. Thanks for reading!
Answer
You have some excellent ideas here. So excellent, in fact, that we actually changed the default study room reservation time to two hours after we saw your question. Thank you!
As for having the Husky Card system talk to the room reservation system, we could not agree with you more that this would be ideal. However, when we've asked the Husky Card office about this possibility in the past, they have been unable to assist us. Hopefully it's at least helpful that we shortened the default room reservations. If you want to chat more about study rooms, send me an email at alenaw@uw.edu.