November 15, 2012
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Beta Test, or be Dragged into the Street and Shot
Whoever designs enrolment and registration systems for schools should be shot.
It’s a basic concept of any type of software production that before you let the public use it (or, in the case of school registrations, force them to use it) you should get some people to try it out, and see what they thought about the way you did things. Then, you take that feedback, and then you make changes to the interface so that there’s some connection between the functions that the programmers included and the usability by the average person.
If I have to constantly click on the help button, which refers me to external PDFs explaining how to register, and I need to keep on tabbing between browsers with student handbooks, AND if I need a piece of scrap paper to write things down on the side? Then that means that the registration system is a piece of shit. This isn’t the stone age– we have writing, and far from it, we have semi-intelligent algorithms. You should be able to ask to show me a list of classes that are available, let me tick off which ones I’m interested in, and then give me a summary of ways that I can make these classes fit, or what my options are.
I should not have to be doing the legwork when I’m paying a school to teach me. Spending a couple of hours on enrolment is not homework that I’m credited for, nor should I need to be.
I guarantee that if you took the average law school professor and told him to enrol for a full semester of courses, they wouldn’t be able to figure it out without calling the help line.
I have actually registered for a class. I did it a few weeks ago. Today, I figured I’d try and figure out what date the class started. It actually took me about fifteen minutes of browsing websites, including my student homepage, the school intranet, and a bunch of handbook PDFs. That’s bullshit. Do you hear me, school registration people? You fuckers need to get your shit together and get the fuck out of the dark ages!! You have gone technological, because that’s cut your staffing costs, but in terms of usability, this is no better than the telephone or in-person registration systems that I used to have to deal with a decade ago. If I have to spend 15 minutes to find out when my first day of classes is (and believe me, it’s not obvious, because several classes start at different weeks) then either you need to make this system easier so I can find things faster, or you need to walk me through this.
