Virtual Page Station UCI
Video Transcript
00:06
Those are all the controls to create and send
00:09
various types of messages and announcements.
00:14
If you are going to give the end user the ability
00:17
to do all these things, you might foolishly think to yourself,
00:21
“Oh well, I should take all the things in this
00:23
control panel and put them on a UCI so the
00:28
end user has the ability to make all those choices.”
00:31
Here’s my UCI.
00:33
I’ll get rid of my logo so I can…
00:36
uh, oops, go away, go away.
00:37
I’ll get rid of my logo and drop all these controls right here.
00:41
That is, once again, grounds for being fired.
00:46
Don’t do this.
00:47
Those are way, way too many controls for the average person
00:51
to have to think about.
00:53
Look at this: for every single one of these controls,
00:56
do you want your receptionist to be deciding if they’re going to split it,
01:00
archive it, or retry?
01:01
Do you want the receptionist at the front of the
01:05
restaurant to have to decide how many times this
01:07
message is going to go back into the queue if it gets interrupted?
01:10
No, that’s not for them to worry about. They just need a button to press to say,
01:15
“Mr. Jones, your table is ready.”
01:18
Don’t give too many controls.
01:21
If you give too many controls on a UCI,
01:23
you’re going to overwhelm the user with just too many options,
01:27
and that makes it far more confusing for them than helpful.
01:30
You want to give them the minimal number of controls that they
01:34
need in order to effectively work with the system.
01:38
In this case, I would say they need the talk button for sure.
01:43
You probably want to give them the cancel button
01:44
just in case they want to get rid of something.
01:47
You probably want to have them choose which mode
01:50
they are going to choose between, but even that,
01:54
I wouldn’t give them that control.
01:57
Why? Because that control is a drop-down menu,
02:00
and that drop-down menu has words like live,
02:02
auto, delay, loop, message—five different options.
02:06
I don’t want them picking between five different options.
02:08
That’s confusing. Are they going to know what auto means?
02:11
No. Give them something that is easy to use.
02:14
So, for something like this,
02:16
if they need to choose between a live page and a message,
02:19
I’m going to give them buttons that give them just that.
02:21
How will you do that?
02:22
Well, you know, a couple of different ways you can do it.
02:24
For me personally,
02:25
I think I would use maybe a selector.
02:27
I’ll come on over here, and I’ll grab a selector from the…
02:35
there it is.
02:36
I’ll drag this in,
02:38
and I’ll use the selector to control the mode of my virtual page station.
02:45
Let’s expose the mode control pin,
02:47
wire the output of the selector to the virtual page station.
02:51
I’ll open this up and hop into emulation mode to define
02:55
what my output options are going to be.
02:58
Option one is going to be live;
03:00
option two is going to be message.
03:02
Make sure that these match exactly the string in the
03:06
control that you are potentially going to change.
03:09
Let’s test it out to make sure it works.
03:10
If I click live, yes indeed, it changes the mode to live.
03:13
If I click message, yes indeed,
03:15
it changes the mode to message.
03:17
Perfect, that’s what I’m looking for.
03:18
So, I’m going to take these two buttons,
03:22
selection one and selection two, and put those on my UCI.
03:26
That way, I don’t have to give them a drop-down
03:29
menu of options they don’t understand.
03:31
I can just name this one message
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—I’m sorry, that’s live, that’s live,
03:36
and that’s message.
03:37
Now they just have two buttons that they can
03:40
choose to choose their mode.
03:43
What else do they need?
03:45
Do they need to choose the priority?
03:47
Probably not, probably not, hopefully not.
03:51
I would refrain from giving this to them.
03:53
More likely, you’ll choose what the priority for this
03:57
station is going to be or what the types of messages
03:59
they’re going to announce are.
04:01
I don’t want them picking any of the rest of this.
04:03
I do want them to probably pick which message
04:05
they’re going to send if they’re in message mode,
04:07
and then lastly, they probably want the zones.
04:09
So, I’ll give them all five zones, and I’m going to delete all the rest of this.
04:17
Those are the actual controls they’re going to need.
04:20
Alright, now I’m going to spend a couple of minutes
04:23
and make this look a little prettier,
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so let’s do some… let’s do some time lapse here we…
04:31
Go.
04:40
Okay, that only took three seconds.
04:42
It was so easy.
04:43
I’ve just spent a couple of minutes to make this a
04:46
little bit more easy on the eyes.
04:48
I’ve got my talk button.
04:49
I can choose between live and message and choose my five zones.
04:53
I even went a little bit of extra distance here.
04:55
When it’s in live mode, I removed the message field entirely.
04:59
When I go to message mode, then I fade in that message,
05:02
so it’s on a separate layer,
05:03
which I’m doing by controlling a UCI layer controller.
05:07
I added a layer onto my UCI so that when the second button is selected,
05:10
I fade in that second field.
05:12
That way, if someone is not making a message happen,
05:15
they don’t even need to worry about it because it’s not on screen.
05:19
Here I have on my UCI,
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so now I can choose to pick the lobby.
05:23
Let me make sure that my hover monitor is still saved here,
05:27
and I will go to my message.
05:29
I will pick the appropriate message,
05:31
make that happy hour, and we’ll hit play, and it all goes from there.
05:36
An announcement from Fake Hotel:
05:40
“Ladies and gentlemen, Fake Hotel would like to
05:42
announce our fake happy hour in the fake bar from 3:45 to 3:46,
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where all drinks will be 0% off. Thank you.” Good announcement.
05:55
Alright, so I’ve made a UCI for my paging system.
05:59
It’s pretty simple.
06:01
However, there’s still a better way to go even with this.
06:07
This is still a rather manual method where people
06:10
are choosing the destinations,
06:12
choosing what type of material they’re sending out,
06:14
and hitting play.
06:16
You might want to make it even easier,
06:18
and you can make it even easier by creating just a
06:21
single button for some common messages you may be sending out.
06:25
Maybe all the time you’re sending out a page that opens up
06:29
the microphone so you can tell people
06:31
that their room is ready, for instance.
06:32
Maybe you’re sending out announcements whenever
06:36
the food trucks arrive,
06:37
and you want to send this announcement to the
06:39
various areas of the building where the people
06:42
will know the food truck is there.
06:44
For things like that,
06:45
for repeatable announcements that you do a lot,
06:49
it sure would be nice to just have a single button that
06:52
does all that for you, right?
06:53
Rather than choosing it every single time.
06:55
We can do that, and we’re going to do that.
06:57
Let’s take a quick break first.
06:59
Alright, see you after the break.