Voice your concerns about UW's web systems
Today's Daily Bulletin at UW called for input about your experiences with the Universities online systems such as Ace, Quest, and Jobmine. I can't help but urge the UW student readers to write them about how bad these three applications are in terms of responsiveness, usability, accessibility, and standards compliance.
Ace is bloatware. Most courses need little more than a static HTML website, and nothing more. There is no need for a student to have to log in and drill down through multiple menu layers to get to content. You cannot bookmark pages of interest, and everything is composed of frames. There is double, and even triple repetitive navigation in some areas which only serves to confuse users. Just take a look at the URLs that it generates during your sessions. Rather than going AJAX on us, they need to nail down their core first to ensure that when a new browser is released that everyone will be able to use their product. There was 4 months, or more, of public beta for IE7. It is not acceptable for their official policy to be "Don't install IE 7 yet, wait please." Someone at Angel software should be fired over this, seriously. I want to know how they ever got awards for this crap.
Jobmine and Quest are a disgrace. Unfortunately, Jobmine is a public disgrace which a lot of very important people, the people who hire all the co-op students, must use each and every term. No back button support, periodic responsiveness issues, and lack of tabbed browsing support plague these ugly animals. They should get their info out of the Peoplesoft database now, and move to a better system. I don't enjoy taking the heat from my interviewers about how badly the online co-op system sucks. There needs to be a change.
It's my belief that if the University were to approach a group of talented Computer Science students and say; "We have a co-op job for you. You have 4 months to build (1) a new Quest, (2) Jobmine, or (3) Ace, that our problems would be almost completely solved. But, sadly students don't know what they are missing, or don't want to take the time to write an email. Please do write them and state your opinions.
Nov 30, -0001
3:00 am
I think you meant "can't not". S'okay, though... I can get occasionally get all laced up in my own luxurious linguistic linguine.
Nov 30, -0001
3:00 am
And now for a serious comment...I think there's a very large and loud crowd that yells "suck!" without really having much of an idea what the specific problems are.People like you and I who have very strong understandings of modern web design techniques and best-practices have very little trouble figuring out what's wrong. I would fear that if they just handed the project off to a random group of students, it could get a lot worse before it got better. (What, build a new Jobmine? Beep, beep, Dreamweaver coming though!)The funniest thing about the whole debacle is how ridiculously simple the software's functionality really is. You could practically implement Jobmine in a lightly hacked copy of PunBB. (Forums are job categories, threads are jobs, posts are applications, users have specific access, etc.)What they *really* need is for the enterprising group of students to step forward themselves. If they could publish what the Jobmine DB schema looks like, we could likely hack together a decent front-end for it in a matter of days.
Nov 30, -0001
3:00 am
I've talked to people about the Off Campus Housing site re:Database access, and they were surprisingly compliant (maybe they just wanted me to stop scraping their site each night). I've also been in touch with the people behind JobMine a few times and their responses are far the best of the three above applications support staff. I really want to help them with guidance from a interface-critical students point of view. If they are willing to listen, I am going to keep the channels open. Unfortunately I still struggle with presenting myself in a completely non-hostile matter. And we all know that anger gets us nowhere. I can't find the email right now, but they did mention "talk about talks" that were going to happen with regard to a next-gen Jobmine/Quest. I fear that my time at UW will be nearly over before they even start.
Nov 30, -0001
3:00 am
Once again ACE is down. This time with a error. Lets see if this comment system will let me post a URL. Here is a link to a screenshot: http://img78.imageshack.us/img78/6849/aceerrorbp9.jpg