Before you begin
In order to follow the steps in this tutorial, you need to have an account.
Creating a new account is free and all you need is a valid email address.
Select the appropriate schedule type
Click New Schedule in the menu on the right side of your Dashboard.
You will be directed to the New Schedule Wizard where you are first asked to choose between a Resource, Capacity or Service schedule.
For the queue we are building a resource schedule is a good choice.
It’s possible to use one of the other types, but pick “Resource” if you want to follow along with this tutorial.
Decide how users can access the schedule
Next you will be asked whether users should be required to log in to access the queue.
We pick “No log in necessary” since that’s easiest for customers.
If you ask them to create an account that’s a bit more work for them but it will allow them to modify their appointment later.
Choose how many customers you want to schedule in one slot
For this example we pick one customer per slot.
In a subsequent step you will be asked to define how large a slot is.
So you can, for example, choose to have very small 1 minute slots with a single customer per minute, or you can create 10-minute slots and allow 10 users at a time, and both those would offer the same capacity.
If you are unsure, just pick something, both values can be changed later, of course.
Name your schedule
The title you give to your schedule in combination with your account name forms the URL that your customers will see in their browser when they use your schedule.
Provide a short but descriptive name for the schedule, for example pick the name of your shop and click Next.
You can always change this (as well as your account name) but note that if you do so, the schedule’s URL will change accordingly.
Specify availability
For appointment length specify the length of a slot, we pick 5 minutes here, and check the box “All appointments have a fixed length”.
Under the heading “When can appointments start?” select “At specific times” and copy the following: *:00, *:05, *:10, *:15, *:20, *:25, *:30, *:35, *:40, *:45, *:50, *:55
Adding these constraints will allow the system to show a nicer UI when picking a time.
Make adjustments so it looks like a queue
Clicking Finish creates an empty schedule and puts it online right away.
We are going to make a few more adjustments to make this schedule suitable for our purpose.
Click the Configure button, and select the “Layout” tab.
At the option “Vertical scale for week and day view” select the option “10 min/interval”.
Under the heading “Which views should be available?” deselect the “Month view” and click “Available time” as the default view.
Click “Save changes” at the bottom of the page.
Next go to the “Process” tab and select the fields that you want customers to enter.
We set “Full name” to required, and switch all the other ones to “Don’t ask”.
If you want to capture your customers email or phone you could select that here.
Under the heading “Where do we send the user after successfully creating a reservation?” pick “Send the user to a URL” and enter a link to a page on your site.
Preferably this would be a page with some kind of “Thank you” message.
In our example app. We send customers to a page that shows the queue, but that’s not as practical because customer names are hidden.
Finally, go to the “Access” tab and under the heading “Can a user see details of entries created by someone else?” select “The schedule shows no details…”.
For a shop this would be the obvious choice for privacy reasons, but if you are setting this up for an office where people know each other you could decide to show the names on the list.