[Assignment] Try it Yourself.

"By wearing a prototype medical device throughout their daily activities, the team understood the physical, social, and emotional implications for patients who might use it" 

I Andrew Desmond want to understand the Laptop rental scheme in the UCD James Joyce library. 

My procedure will be:

To try the product myself, in order to appreciate the actual experience a real user has. I will use the product over the course of the day and record my findings and suggest recommendations based on these findings. I also plan to record my use of the product. 

I found the Following: 

I found that swiping the UCard for a second time, seemed like a redundant step. While observing, I noticed that swiping your UCard the second time tended to be the source of many errors for first time users. 

You have to wait a minute until after the person in front of you has closed the laptop drawer. This was annoying at times. 

The system was easy to use, fast and all the laptops were in excellent condition. 

The ability to connect to the printers form the laptop was a huge benefit, it saved me having to queue to print my files. 

I felt under pressure, and I was always checking the time, with the 3 hour time limit.

Their was no machine in the Blackrock Library.

I didn't read the T&C as I didn't feel comfortable standing in front of the machine reading the T&C.

The first time I went to rent a laptop, they were all gone; this was on a Thursday at 18:00, during the second week of college, which suggests that they may need to invest in more laptops.

Not a great start :) 

Recommendations: 

• The second swiping of the UCard should be removed. It is a redundant step.
• The system shouldn't need to slow down between users, this task should be performed in the background. This would speed up the borrowing and returning process. 
• More physical laptops are needed. 
• This service needs to be available in all 5 of the UCD library's. 
• Their should be  a countdown timer or pop-up when you are near the end of your rental time. 
• The Terms and Conditions should be somewhere on the laptop, possible as a background on the home screen.