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Unintuitive design in room reservation system

Booking a study room in your university might be your routine. You go to the reservation page, choose the time period, fill the reservation form and submit your request. Sounds easy-peasy, right? But what should you do if you need to change the time you chose before submitting your request? Reset your choice? Click other time slots to cover the previous choice? Re-click the chosen slots to cancel them? None of the solutions I could think of helped me out in this situation the first time I tried to change the time slots I chose when booking a room in Perry-Castañeda Library. After some struggle, finally I figured it out and got shocked by the unbelievable way to achieve my goal here. Let’s talk about more details.

When a UT student wants to reserve a room in Perry-Castañeda Library, she gets to the library website and arrives at the page for room reservations. Then she clicks the time slots she plans to book. The picture below shows the interface she is on.

Before she submits the request, she realized that her group would need a bigger room to meet and discuss for their course project. So she’s thinking of changing the chosen time slots. But how to achieve this? She has no clue because there are no instructions on the website.

She tried to click other time slots, and this is the only notification.

Except this, nothing changed.

She also tried to find the reset button to re-choose time slots; unfortunately, there is no such a choice in this page.

Then she tried clicking the slots she already chose again, thinking this might cancel the previous clicking. The slot she clicked is the first one “12:00pm-1:00pm”. Well, this time, something happened, unexpectedly though.

As the picture shows above, The slot status she clicked is still chosen, other previous chosen slots switched into unchosen. Then in order to get the 4 hours in another room, she has to click one time slot she needs, and click it again to unselect the last one “12:00pm-1:00pm” of 5.114. Finally she got to achieve her goal to change the time slots, after all of this.

The current way to unselect the slots is not intuitive at all. There is no way that users can think of click one chosen slot and the rest of them will be back to unselected status. Knowing less about the development effort of achieving this, I might guess this would be less effort for developer to achieve. But undoubtedly, it is opposite to users’ intuition and habit.

As mentioned above, there are a few intuitive ways to change the time slots.

The first easiest one could be adding a reset button. Since the maximum slots to choose are just four, even re-clicking all of them is not a big deal. So in this situation, giving users a choice to cancel all chosen slots and redo it is not a bad way or difficult thing. Besides, this button will not affect the visual design at all( if it has some). An example is shown below.

Also, it would be intuitive for users if they can just click the chosen ones again to deselect them. It is a widely used way no matter in the real world or digital world.

It is a small design flaw which is opposite to our intuition. After randomly trying to figure it out, people actually can get used to it and it will not affect a lot in the future. But still, ideally, the current operation workflow to change the status should fit into users’ habit, instead of letting user struggle to figure it out. Even for some reasons, this current way still exists, there should be an instruction or reminder to let users know how to change the status, instead of leaving nothing but a non-intuitive design and shock here.

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