SMS Notifications and Add Queue and Queue Settings Workflows

November 11, 2020

Release 1.3 of Remote Office Hours Queue is here! These changes are based on real user feedback -- please let us know what is important to you by submitting a ticket to the ITS Service Center and/or joining our Beta Tester group (login to join the group) to help us test new ideas. The next release will include Zoom as an online meeting option. This release sets us up for this functionality!

New user-facing features

1. SMS Notifications and Preferences Page. Users can add a US/Canada (+1 country code) phone number that can receive SMS (text) messages to the new Preferences page (accessible in the user dropdown--hover over your uniqname in the upper right while logged in) and enable the notification options they would like to receive. Hosts can receive an SMS notification if an attendee joins their queue which was previously empty, and attendees can receive an SMS notification when they move to the front of the line. (#23 #25 #109 #182 #184 #193 #210 #212 #215)

• Host notification: Someone joined your queue officehours.it.umich.edu/manage/[your queue ID] You opted in to receive these texts from U-M. Opt out at officehours.it.umich.edu/preferences/
• Attendee notification: It's your turn in queue officehours.it.umich.edu/queue/[your queue ID] You opted in to receive these texts from U-M. Opt out at officehours.it.umich.edu/preferences/

Note: only US/Canada phone number are supported due to technical limitations of sending international SMS messages with our SMS platform.

Hosts will be prompted to enable SMS notifications if their queue is empty:

No Meetings in Queue
Did you know? You can get notified by SMS (text) message when someone joins your empty queue by adding your cell phone number and enabling host notifications in your User Preferences.

Attendees will be prompted to enable SMS notifications if they join a queue and are NOT first in line:

Did you know? You can receive an SMS (text) message when it's your turn by by adding your cell phone number and enabling attendee notifications in your User Preferences.

2. Workflow for Creating Queues. When hosts create new queues, they will navigate through a workflow to input the name, description (if applicable), allowed meeting types (in-person and/or BlueJeans video conferencing), and other hosts. This workflow will help first-time users understand queue options and setup. New queues are created by clicking Add Queue from the Manage (My Meeting Queues) page. (#95)

3. Workflow for Managing Queue Settings. Management of queue settings, including the name, description, allowed meeting types, and hosts, as well as the option to permanently delete the queue, have been moved into a Settings page. Access the Settings page by clicking Settings in the upper right of your queue management page. This move helps to declutter the queue management page. (#94 #208 #221 )

Bug fixes and other user-facing changes

4. Form Validation Improvements. Validation of queue name, queue description, allowed meeting types, adding new queue hosts, and hosts manually adding attendees to their queue has been improved. Fields with invalid entries will be outlined in red, with a red error just below the field to clarify what needs to be fixed. (#183)
   

5. Attendee Must Confirm to Leave the Line. To help avoid attendees accidentally clicking to leave the line and therefore losing their place, attendees who click Leave the Line must now confirm in a pop-up that they want to leave the line. (#137)

6. Prompt to Refresh Page. If a user's session becomes stale (they become disconnected) and the page is unable to automatically reconnect, the user will see a prompt to refresh the page to fix the problem. (#168)

7. Usability and Accessibility Improvements. Various features have been improved for usability and accessibility, including color contrast and focus indicators. (#108 #133 #155 #156 #158 #159 #162 #198 #202 )

Non-user-facing changes

#186 #179 #188 #176 #224

Meeting Type Options, Agendas, and More

September 22, 2020

Release 1.2 of Remote Office Hours Queue is here! These changes are based on real user feedback -- please let us know what is important to you by submitting a ticket to the ITS Service Center and/or joining our Beta Tester group (login to join the group) to help us test new ideas. Future releases will include Zoom as an online meeting option and notifications for hosts and attendees. This release sets us up for this functionality!

New user-facing features

1. Hosts can set meeting type options. Hosts can now choose to allow students to attend office hours via an in person or online meeting by selecting the options on the “Manage Queue” page. (#77)
   

2. Attendees can now add an agenda to their meeting. When an attendee joins the queue, they can let the host(s) know what they wish to discuss by entering it in the “Agenda” field while they’re in queue. The field is limited to 100 characters, and the hosts of the queue can see this information by clicking the “Join Info” link for the attendee. (#17)

3. Attendee-view has been redesigned! To help attendees identify when it’s their turn and give them an idea of when to join the meeting, we’ve updated the layout of the attendee’s view when they join a queue:

   • Large text lets attendees know that they are in line
   • Position in queue, time joined, and the meeting agenda fields are separated out to bring more attention to these items.
   • Instructions on how to join are moved under the “Join Meeting” button to improve accessibility and to visually associate that information with the action. Banner messages have been updated to reflect this. (#8, #17, #118)

Bug fixes and other user-facing changes

4. Navigation links have been added to the header. To help attendees and hosts navigate through the app, we’ve added a “Home” link to the global navigation. Additionally, we’ve added a “Manage Queues” link to the user menu to help hosts quickly reach the queues they are part of.
   

5. Updated the BlueJeans international numbers link. As of May, U-M offers global premium calling for students, faculty, and staff calling into a BlueJeans meeting. We’ve updated the international numbers link in the attendee view to reflect this. (#83)

6. Description field changes. There is now a limit of 1000 characters in the Description field for a queue. There is a counter that shows how many characters have been used out of 1000. If too many characters have been added to the Description field:

   • The field is outlined in red
   • The limit text is changed to red
   • The limit text displays the number of characters over the limit that are in the Description field (#111, #107, #69)
     

7. Better Error Handling. We’ve improved how errors are displayed throughout the app.
   For hosts:

   • On the “Manage Queue” page, errors were occasionally not appearing when a different error was already shown. This should be fixed, and the appropriate error message should display at the top of the page when it occurs. (#67)
   • If a host is removed from a queue while they are on the “Manage” page, they will now see an error message. (#117, #118)

   For attendees:

   • If a queue is deleted while an attendee is still in line, the attendee will now see an error (#118)

8. Auto-Refresh Improvements. Instead of auto-refreshing at 3-second intervals, Remote Office Hours Queue will now auto-refresh instantly when a change is made. For example, if two hosts of the same queue both have the queue open, and one host closes the queue, the other host will see the queue status change to Closed instantly. This change was made for the following reasons:

   • Users see changes sooner
   • The refresh icon that displayed in the lower right while the page was refreshing is removed, minimizing distraction and improving accessibility
   • This change significantly improves the application's ability to scale for more users, improving speed and reliability and allowing us to prepare for features that will increase usage, such as Zoom integration

1.1.1 Hotfix for Error Logging

If a user is on a queue page (Manage Queue page or the queue page itself) and the queue is deleted, the user will now be redirected to a search that searches the queue ID. This is to eliminate an error logging issue where the application would repeatedly try to reach the page for the deleted queue and log an error every 3 seconds until the browser window was closed.

1.1 Open and Close Queues, Assign Meetings to Host, and more!

June 2, 2020

Announcing release 1.1 of Remote Office Hours Queue! These changes are based on real user feedback--please let us know what is important to you by submitting a ticket to the ITS Service Center and/or joining our Beta Tester group (login to join the group) to help us test new ideas.

Note: During the course of the work for this release, the codebase for Remote Office Hours Queue was moved from GitLab to GitHub. Some of these items refer to issues that were in GitLab. Links to GitLab require U-M Weblogin to access.

New user-facing features

1. Hosts can open and close their queues. All queues are open by default until a host decides to close them. Attendees can only join a queue if it is open. Closing a queue does not delete meetings in the queue. It only stops new attendees from joining the queue and allows a host to decide how they want to handle the remaining meetings. #18

2. Assign meetings in the queue to specific hosts. This functionality helps avoid confusion when multiple hosts are collaborating in a queue at the same time. Hosts can assign a meeting to themself before entering the meeting so other hosts see an attendee is being helped and can move on to the next meeting. #24

3. Clearer layout for a queue's “Meetings Up Next” section. The following information will be displayed for every meeting in the queue:

• the number/order in line
• the attendee’s name and uniqname
• assigned host if any and the ability to assign a host
• actions that can be taken on the meeting—Start Meeting, Join Info, or Delete
  

4. New Join Info button. Clicking “Join Info” provides additional information about each meeting, including the time the user joined the queue, the "location" of the meeting (currently the only option is BlueJeans--this is in preparation to release Zoom and in-person meetings as options in the future), and information on how the host can dial in to the meeting on a phone. #14 #29

5. Expanded dial-in options. Attendees will see expanded information on how to dial in to a meeting by phone. It will display a phone number for attendees in the USA and provide a link to show all international dial in options. #31

6. Breadcrumb navigation. Navigation "breadcrumbs" have been added to the top of the page to help users know where they are and find their way back to a previous page. #35

7. Administrative “Message of the Day” option. Remote Office Hours Queue administrators can post a "Message of the Day" to broadcast important information about the application to users, such as communication about new features or service outages. #48

Bug fixes and other user-facing improvements

1. If a user's session expires (i.e. they were logged in, but now they are logged out) while using Remote Office Hours Queue, they will be automatically redirected to U-M Weblogin and then back to the page they were on. This fixes a bug where users whose sessions expired were seeing errors when attempting to use Remote Office Hours Queue without knowing their session had expired.

2. If a host deletes a Remote Office Hours Queue meeting in BlueJeans directly without first deleting the associated meeting in Remote Office Hours Queue, users are still able to delete the associated meeting in Remote Office Hours Queue. This fixes a bug where users who deleted the meeting in BlueJeans directly saw an error when attempting to then delete the associated meeting in Remote Office Hours Queue. #41

3. The "Virtual Office Hours" header has been removed from the /manage page 1) because using "Virtual" instead of "Remote" is inconsistent, and 2) in favor of using the breadcrumbs mentioned in item 6 above to help ground the user in where they are. #36

4. Remote Office Hours Queue administrators can now view the Edit page (/manage/<queue_id>) of a queue they are not the host of. This fixes a bug where administrators saw an error when attempting to view the Edit page. #42

5. As part of implementing breadcrumbs (see item 6 above), the gray box container on the homepage has been removed so as not to clash with the breadcrumbs container, and the color contrast for the login button that unauthenticated users see on the homepage main content area (i.e. not the login button in the navigation bar) has been increased to improve visibility. #53 #13

6. If a host has never used BlueJeans before, they must log in to BlueJeans before being able to use Remote Office Hours Queue. Hosts will see a message instructing them to log in to BlueJeans if this is the case. This fixes a bug where hosts only saw an error when this was the case, without knowing why they were seeing an error or how to fix it. #55

7. If something is wrong with BlueJeans that is causing an error in Remote Office Hours Queue, Remote Office Hours Queue will notify the user that a BlueJeans error is the cause of the problem in Remote Office Hours queue. This fixes a bug where hosts only saw an error when this was the case, without knowing why they were seeing an error. #54

Non-user-facing changes

1. Allow admins to un-delete queues from the admin interface if a user deleted a queue by accident

2. Delete all meetings in the queue when a queue is deleted (i.e. cascade deletes)

3. Add Google Analytics so usage of ROHQ can be tracked over time

4. Add an Apache 2.0 License

5. Add a README file with basic information on starting the app

6. Use ASGI Server in preparation for using Django 3's asynchronous views. #39

1.0.1 Queue Search

April 8, 2020

The Remote Office Hours Queue app, originally released March 19, 2020 was updated April 8, 2020 in order to add a much-requested feature allowing multiple users to share a queue. Unfortunately, the update necessitated a change in the URL structure of the links attendees receive when joining an office hours queue. As a result, links created by the app prior to April 8 no longer map to an active queue. ITS has implemented a way to help users find their way to the correct queue.

The old URL construct was https://officehours.it.umich.edu/queue/uniqname, where “uniqname” is the uniqname of the host. To allow hosts to share queues, have multiple queues, and not tie a queue to only one person, URLs are now constructed by /queue/id/ (e.g. https://officehours.it.umich.edu/queue/123) instead of /queue/uniqname/ (e.g. https://officehours.it.umich.edu/queue/nemcard).

If a person navigates to an old queue/uniqname link, Remote Office Hours Queue will automatically initiate a search. This search looks for any queues meeting either of the following criteria:

• Queues hosted by the uniqname after /queue/ in the URL
• Queues that have the uniqname in the name of the queue

This aligns with normal search behavior, which allows users to search by host uniqname or by queue name.

The app will then present attendees with a list of queues to choose from. They can select a queue to join from the list. 

Attendees who reach the search results page through redirection from a /queue/uniqname/ link will see a yellow alert at the top of the page. This alert says, “We didn't find a queue there! It's ok, we made a change that moved some queues around--it's us, not you. To help you find the queue you were looking for, we searched for any queues hosted by nemcard. Learn more about this search.”

1.0 Shared Queues and more!

April 8, 2020

In this release, the Remote Office Hours Queue team rewrote the application to allow hosts to have multiple queues and queues to have multiple hosts. This release included:

• Management page to see all of a user's queues https://officehours.it.umich.edu/manage
• Queue management page to manage an individual queue
• Hosts can create or be hosts of as many queues as they want
• Queues can have many hosts; hosts can add other people as hosts to their queue
• Hosts can name a queue and change that name at any time from the queue management page
• Hosts can create a description for the queue and change that description at any time
• Hosts can see when a queue was created from the queue management page
• Hosts can permanently delete queues from the queue management page
• Hosts can copy the queue URL from the queue management page to easily share it with attendees

0.1 Introducing Remote Office Hours Queue!

March 19, 2020
Initial release for Remote Office Hours Queue