Inspiration
It is very time-consuming to schedule a conference room for recurring meetings, yet at Wayfair we must schedule many meetings so a lot of people are wasting time doing this busy work.
What it does
We removed the user from a large part of the room scheduling process by giving them a checkbox labeled "I need a conference room" and then the system finds the best rooms and makes the reservation immediately(closest to their seat, right room for the number of people, and alternatives). The user can override the systems rooms selections if they want to.
How we built it
We prototyped our idea with react, php, and SQL. We created simulated data of heavily booked rooms in the near term and fewer booked rooms over the next 3 months. This resulted in 200k room reservations for our system to test with.
Challenges we ran into
We ran out of time to do everything we wanted to, but produced a prototype we are happy with.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The concept appears to work & is as easy to use as we hoped for.
What we learned
We surveyed two expert Outlook users and found they spend an hour or more a week scheduling conference rooms. We want this instead to only take a few seconds a week.
What's next for Waybetter Room Finder for Recurring Meetings
Our concept focuses on the room reservation part of meetings and should be able to link with Outlook or other scheduling systems. It has the potential to save Wayfair a lot of time and frustration scheduling conference rooms if it was completed and linked to our calendar system.
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