A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement matches a restroom satisfaction kiosk's button-press timestamps against the cleaning contractor's own service-scan log, finding four in ten "very satisfied" presses land within ninety seconds of a scan.
A term-long timestamp match ties four in ten "very satisfied" presses to a service scan, not a visitor
Every restroom exit kiosk on campus puts the same four-button question to whoever walks past it, and until this term nobody had checked who was actually answering. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, Nobody’s Unhappy at 6 AM, matches two buildings’ worth of kiosk button-press timestamps against the cleaning contractor’s own service-scan log across a full semester, and finds one rating answering back suspiciously fast.
A four-button kiosk can only ever ask the person standing in front of it, and lately that person is increasingly on the clock.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The team paired every logged press against the nearest preceding badge-tap service scan across six kiosks, then compared the timing against what an even spread of presses across each cleaning round would produce. Four in ten of the kiosk’s top rating landed inside ninety seconds of a scan; every other rating scattered across the whole gap between rounds, matching what the even spread would predict.
“The score was never asked to say who pressed it, only what got pressed,” said Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement. Facilities has confirmed the kiosk’s monthly figure will get a second look before it’s next cited in the contractor’s service review — the operational use the Office of Research Outputs points to as the finding’s most immediate consequence.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1rx612.