User Fast Switching Ideas Needed

Question

I'm looking for ideas on how to implement some type of fast login scenario for an application that will allow employees to quickly login.

I work with an organization that has employees rotate every 30 minutes to a different location. If there are 3 employees, then the first employee won't come back to the checkout station for an hour. The checkout station is a higher traffic area where different things are borrowed by customers. Right now they have a generic login, but the organization wants to track which employee checked out/in a borrowed item. The problem is when they rotate there are customers there many times and having them logoff and login either via a workstation login or an application login is too slow for customer service.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I think a fingerprint reader would work well for logging in users. Then, they wouldn't have to type anything to log in.

There are plenty of biometric SDKs online that should be able to help you with this. And, I think some commercial readers will do something similar already, so you wouldn't even need to write any code.

Here's an article on Microsoft's Upgraded Fingerprint Reader

Also, you can have them scan once to log in, and once they are logged in, they can scan again to get logged completely out of the system (instead of just locking the screen or forgetting to log out and walk away.)

Answer 2

Use an application-level login, but make it only based on typing in their employee ID. This will simply identify who they are, exchanging security for speed while not giving up identity. Using employee ID's for this is a good way of guaranteeing uniqueness. I've seen systems like this work in retail, and it's really fast. Employees get used to typing this number into the console.

Answer 3

I'm not sure if it's in your budget but this sounds like a good use for those little button 1-wire devices. Basically it's an electronic "key" that is about the size of a button and can be read very quickly.

So Employee A goes to the station, puts his button on the pad(takes like 2 seconds) and he's logged in. When he needs to leave he pushes one button to log out, then employee B can come and log in, etc etc.

a picture of the button: