Needs improvement
Parking booking feature is terrible on the app. Often is broken and not able to view a grid system makes booking slots for part of the time a nightmare to try and guess when a space could be free.
Desperately needs improving
Just not fit for purpose, too often doesn’t work or locks users out for it to be the main tool for desk booking.
Poor
Tries to get you to change your PIN all the time when I don’t want to. My PIN is my own personal one so that I don’t forget it!
Slow and Unsteady wins this particular race
Let’s start with registration. Slow and bureaucratic and once you have registered you have to choose a restrictive PIN which, if you forget you cannot reuse because unfathomably you cannot use the last 12 PINs you have set. No other corporate application we have enforced this level of pointlessness. So assuming you can remember your PIN (which isn’t recorded as remembered passwords is banned on corporate devices) and log in, this is where things get really bad.
The app then asks for permission to use Bluetooth to determine where you are. Guess what? It doesn’t work. It has no idea and you have to manually put your location into the app anyway… which took ages to load up each option for site, building and floor. Once using the app, a red banner pops up from the bottom of the screen informing you “Your location could not be determined” which gets in the way when you are using the app. My advice is don’t turn this option on, because there’s no way to turn it off later.
Slow. Really really staggeringly slow and this on a three month old iPhone 14 Pro to boot. So slow to load the first time because it’s downloading all the images on the main screen, it took fully over 1 minutes before it could even be used (on Gigabit Wi-Fi). Fully one third of the screen real estate is taken up with a wholly pointless picture and the lower portion of the screen loses another quarter of the screen to just white space. Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” song springs to mind for real estate company’s app that wastes so much of it here.
Clicking each main screen option doesn’t take you to the thing that you have clicked on, but does a pointless animation transition to make the picture bigger and in full colour. Guess what, this takes AGES because it’s so flipping slow. At last we reveal what the wasted white space was for, which is tiny icons for things that you get if you’d just clicked the option. What is the point of this? Just take us to the screen with the options instead of wasting time with making them appear in the main screen. For options like Discover, Events and Parking there are no shortcuts to display, so it remains wasted screen space. This is bad UI design that smacks of nothing more that “look how clever the developers are”, or “we’re being paid to develop this, better make it look like we’ve spent a lot on it”.
Menu and picture transitions are slow and full of judder. UI tip. Simplicity and speed win hands down every day of the week. Nobody is impressed with fancy UI flourishes. Microsoft and Apple figured this out a decade ago and dropped then from their UIs. This app should too.
Now we get to the real nub of the app’s problems… it’s massively out-of-date. There are meeting rooms listed on the Wayfinder that are permanently closed. Whole areas of some buildings are construction sites that are still recorded in loving (slow to load) colour representations. The Gym and Restaurant are hollowed our shells; the Reception area is in a totally different building and God help you if you need the nurse’s room in a hurry. If you do need an up-to-date site map for Radbroke, then the intranet site map on the Radbroke Intranet site is more current (radbrokemap/).
Booking things is reasonably straightforward: It’s hard to mess up a calendar. However, the load times again in checking to see if you already have reservations, or retrieving reservations is slow, with yet more pointless UI flourishes to keep you “entertained” while you wait. On the subject of reservations, why can’t I see all my reservations in one place? I can reserve a room, a desk, a car parking space and event attendance, but to see these I have to go into four separate options in the app which… takes ages. Why isn’t there a single reservation option where I can see/book everything?
Reliability isn’t great. Despite allowing the app to use biometric login, a dialogue box asking for this option to be re-enabled appears on average 1 in every 6 times the app runs. Crashes are occasional but can result in having to delete the app, reload it, re-request a PIN etc… etc…
So, in summary, this app is a necessary evil if you need to book a parking space or a meeting room but for everything else, it’s best avoided as there are better ways to accomplish everything else. Very occasionally, correct login details are rejected, resulting in deletion, installing, requesting credentials (again) etc… etc…. Reading the other reviews for this product, I am not alone in this either.
The app then asks for permission to use Bluetooth to determine where you are. Guess what? It doesn’t work. It has no idea and you have to manually put your location into the app anyway… which took ages to load up each option for site, building and floor. Once using the app, a red banner pops up from the bottom of the screen informing you “Your location could not be determined” which gets in the way when you are using the app. My advice is don’t turn this option on, because there’s no way to turn it off later.
Slow. Really really staggeringly slow and this on a three month old iPhone 14 Pro to boot. So slow to load the first time because it’s downloading all the images on the main screen, it took fully over 1 minutes before it could even be used (on Gigabit Wi-Fi). Fully one third of the screen real estate is taken up with a wholly pointless picture and the lower portion of the screen loses another quarter of the screen to just white space. Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” song springs to mind for real estate company’s app that wastes so much of it here.
Clicking each main screen option doesn’t take you to the thing that you have clicked on, but does a pointless animation transition to make the picture bigger and in full colour. Guess what, this takes AGES because it’s so flipping slow. At last we reveal what the wasted white space was for, which is tiny icons for things that you get if you’d just clicked the option. What is the point of this? Just take us to the screen with the options instead of wasting time with making them appear in the main screen. For options like Discover, Events and Parking there are no shortcuts to display, so it remains wasted screen space. This is bad UI design that smacks of nothing more that “look how clever the developers are”, or “we’re being paid to develop this, better make it look like we’ve spent a lot on it”.
Menu and picture transitions are slow and full of judder. UI tip. Simplicity and speed win hands down every day of the week. Nobody is impressed with fancy UI flourishes. Microsoft and Apple figured this out a decade ago and dropped then from their UIs. This app should too.
Now we get to the real nub of the app’s problems… it’s massively out-of-date. There are meeting rooms listed on the Wayfinder that are permanently closed. Whole areas of some buildings are construction sites that are still recorded in loving (slow to load) colour representations. The Gym and Restaurant are hollowed our shells; the Reception area is in a totally different building and God help you if you need the nurse’s room in a hurry. If you do need an up-to-date site map for Radbroke, then the intranet site map on the Radbroke Intranet site is more current (radbrokemap/).
Booking things is reasonably straightforward: It’s hard to mess up a calendar. However, the load times again in checking to see if you already have reservations, or retrieving reservations is slow, with yet more pointless UI flourishes to keep you “entertained” while you wait. On the subject of reservations, why can’t I see all my reservations in one place? I can reserve a room, a desk, a car parking space and event attendance, but to see these I have to go into four separate options in the app which… takes ages. Why isn’t there a single reservation option where I can see/book everything?
Reliability isn’t great. Despite allowing the app to use biometric login, a dialogue box asking for this option to be re-enabled appears on average 1 in every 6 times the app runs. Crashes are occasional but can result in having to delete the app, reload it, re-request a PIN etc… etc…
So, in summary, this app is a necessary evil if you need to book a parking space or a meeting room but for everything else, it’s best avoided as there are better ways to accomplish everything else. Very occasionally, correct login details are rejected, resulting in deletion, installing, requesting credentials (again) etc… etc…. Reading the other reviews for this product, I am not alone in this either.
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Most unreliable app
Works 1 time out of 10.
There’s always a problem.
Even when there’s no problem you still need to exit the app after each new booking to make another booking
And even when that works the app is not user friendly at all
There’s always a problem.
Even when there’s no problem you still need to exit the app after each new booking to make another booking
And even when that works the app is not user friendly at all
