The way Booker forces users to create and manage staff schedules has always baffled me. One of the reasons it baffles me is because I am convinced that the people that designed and programmed this part of the Booker platform have never used it in real life.
The first thing you will notice is lots and lots of dropdown menus. When used judiciously and with skill, dropdown menus can save users a great deal of time, but Booker uses then neither judiciously or skillfully, in my opinion.
When scheduling a staff “Workday” you will notice that the dropdown menu goes off the screen in both directions. This means a great deal of scrolling to select the times you want. When using this method to create a schedule, you will also notice that even though you select a 2:00 pm start time, for example, the end time still pops up the entire dropdown menu, instead of intelligently only offering choices past 2:00 pm. This seems like an oversight the first time you have to do it, and downright insane by the 20th time you are doing it. EVERY TIME-BASED DROPDOWN WORKS THIS SAME WAY!
You will also notice that the dropdown menu is in 15 minute increments. We only schedule on the hour, so the 15 minute increments are simply in the way for us. Furthermore, there are other places on Booker, like the Appointment schedule, where these same dropdown menus show up with 5 minute increments. It is confusing that they all look the similar, but are using different time increments. What a pain! Why not just break them down by the minute, Booker? Imagine menus with 6:00 am, 6:01 am, 6:02 am and you will quickly understand how inefficient this method is.
Assume you have done all this work to setup a schedule, then someone on your staff asks for some vacation days. “No problem,” you think, “I will use the dropdown menus to change Workday to Vacation.”
At least marking those days as Vacation days was easy enough — until the gotcha happens. In our case, the staff member revised their vacation and did not need all of the days off originally requested, only a few of them. You would think you could simply toggle the existing workday schedule back on, but no. You have to start over recreating the schedule for that week!
That’s correct, you have to start from scratch. Now you can see why I remain convinced that the folks who designed this have never actually used it.
Booker Scheduling Problems 