The system existed only where nobody was standing.
Staff needed to find and book rooms while walking between meetings, against a booking system that lived on a desktop. In practice that meant asking someone, guessing, or occupying a room and hoping.
The data was all there — the problem was purely one of access, and of deciding which small number of actions deserved to be on a phone screen.
Four actions, immediately reachable.
Find a free room now
Live availability from the existing EMS data, filtered to what is actually free near you.
Book, check in, cancel
The three follow-on actions, each one tap from availability, with no menu to learn.
Live sync with the desktop system
Nothing is a local copy — the app reads and writes the same live data the desktop shows.
Nothing else on the first screen
Reporting and administration deliberately excluded, so the primary action is never competing for attention.
Two calls that shaped the build.
A companion, not a replacement
We resisted rebuilding administration on mobile. The desktop system stays authoritative; the app owns the four things that happen while standing up.
Availability as the home screen
Most booking apps open on your own bookings. We opened on what is free right now, because that is the question people have while walking.
The four common actions became instant.
- Rooms are found and booked from the corridor rather than from a desk.
- Check-in and cancellation actually happen, which makes availability data more accurate for everyone.
- No parallel system to maintain — the app is a window onto data that already existed.
Client-reported outcomes, described qualitatively — we publish numbers only where the client has agreed to them.
