Our desk reservation feature provides you with the ability to allow members and users with allowances to book a desk in advance. It's simple for them and it provides you with a sense of who's planning to come in and when. 

It's important to note the "with allowances" element there. If a user doesn't have any allowances in the space, they need to purchase some via e.g. a day pass before they will be able to reserve their day.

And later this year, we'll be bringing in an enhancement that will enable you to set hard limits on the number of desks that are bookable, giving you effective control of your hotdesk area while enabling user autonomy to self-manage.

The start point here is with creating a flexible space which you do on the top left of your screen:

I've also highlighted the Appearance panel on the bottom right too. This is where you can edit the text that is displayed on the 'Reserve a Desk' component in the User Area.

Here's the detailed view of the flexible workspace I've set up:

I'd recommend you pay particular attention to both the Permission settings (who can view and access this resource) and the Appearance setting (how the flexible space will appear to users) so that you ensure the right people can access the space, and that it looks great too.

Now that we have a flexible space set up and are happy with it, let's move on to the user flow i.e. the experience your users will have in the User Area.

Their first impression will be on the User Area dashboard:

You might have noticed that the text I wrote in the Appearance panel on the first step shows here. If you have multiple flexible spaces for managing different areas e.g. different hotdesk areas, car-parking, creche, etc you should ensure your text is generic enough to be clear to your users what that component enables them to do.

When the user selects the flexible space component, they are taken through to the detailed view of the space:

There are three notable areas here:

Each of these areas responds to the configurations you've set in the Admin Area.

For example, the calendar view will only extend and allow users to reserve a desk as far ahead in time as is permitted. In the case of a standard membership this will be 2 months. In the case of a product, this depends on the expiry date that you've set. You can see on the page above that I have three sets of allowances. April and May relate to my subscription plan. The "Ending 20th November" allowance relates to a bundle of day passes I bought with an expiry date. 

Here's how Habu feeds that information back to the user as they are selecting dates:

An important point to understand here is that reservations are only possible where allowances exist. So if a member has used all of their allowances within a given month, they will not be able to reserve a space unless they add e.g. a day pass to their account. 

Here's an example of a member that has selected all of the days possible within their plan. Note that the remaining days of April are greyed out and are unselectable: 

Now that we've covered the user flow for members let's take a look at things for non-members who have permission to use the space.

For a user without allowances they would be shown a screen like this: 

For them, the next step is to buy or add a product to their account from the products that relate to this space. And by relate, I mean a product that has an allowance for the space in question. This ensures that only relevant products are shown based on the users intention. 

When the user selects the product that suits them, they are taken through to the dedicated product page where they can get allowances to enable them to reserve a day in the flexible area. In this case, due to my configuration for this product, user can reserve the days directly here too:

Once a user has reserved a day, this is shown to you in the admin area for the day in question in the flexible space section:

We'll be adding an extra notification setting soon too which will provide increased visibility for admins. When that's released, you'll find the setting controls via the notifications icon [bell] > Preferences and then setting your preferred option:

This will also mean you'll be able to create an array of automated tasks via our Zapier integration too.