Office Hacks: When Nature Calls At Work …There’s An App For That
In 2016, our friends at Showpad were growing faster than their facilities.
Literally.
With more than 40 employees and only two bathrooms to accommodate everyone working out of their San Francisco office, they soon found that frequent queueing for the loo was negatively affecting productivity.
Renovating their office to add more bathrooms wasn’t a viable option, but applying their problem-solving skills and technical prowess to develop an alternative solution was.
Their first attempt involved a creative repurposing of an Amazon Dash button and reconfiguring it to communicate with a Raspberry Pi. With a bit of wizardry that involves Heroku, MongoDB, and Xcode, the team was able to create a desktop app featuring a simple icon for each restroom.
When occupied, the associated icon would turn red; when unoccupied, the icon would turn green. To signal a bathroom’s availability, everyone simply needed to push the Dash button located on the bathroom door upon entering and again when exiting.
Unfortunately, Amazon didn’t anticipate an off-label use that involved hundreds of button pushes every day—the Dash buttons installed in the Showpad office soon burned out. Instead of replacing the buttons several times each month, our friends at Showpad went back to the drawing board to develop another solution.
Version 2 (AKA “Hold It”) involved the use of magnetic reed switches and a bit of creative wiring to communicate with the Raspberry Pi. This version also included a mobile app that enabled employees to use their phones to queue for the bathroom and receive an alert when it was unoccupied:
The bathrooms were set to a default state of “open.” When the door was opened and closed, the state was set to “occupied.” When the door opened and closed again, the state was set back to “open.”
Everything worked well for a little while until human kindness and basic manners interfered with the switches: if someone held the door open for someone else, the switches wouldn’t make contact, and the data communicated about the bathroom’s occupancy (or lack thereof) quickly fell out of sync with reality.
Several months later, our friends at Showpad luckily relocated to larger offices that featured a better ratio of bathrooms to employees.
Hold It joins the ranks of other homegrown apps that innovative tech employees have created to communicate bathroom status, including the Slack-integrated Ocupado and BUM (the Bathroom Usage Monitor), developed by the Sanborn Media Factory.
What innovative, tech-based hacks has your office developed? Drop us a line at hi@theoffix.com: we’d love to hear from you.
