Interfaces
Posted on March 21, 2002 @ 11:04 in General
Meg Hourihan writes in a thoughtful column: "Poor Interface = Poor Interactions. As a Web application developer, I spend a lot of my time working with user interfaces. Interfaces are both the bane and joy of my professional work. Often, when an interface is good, you don't even notice it. It's only when you can't accomplish your goal that you realize just how poorly the UI's designed. And the same holds true not only for Web or computer interfaces, but for any interface, online or off."
I was just discussing the horrors of navigating our university's website, especially the different departments' websites and this seemed a very appropriate and acurate description of the problem. Found Meg's column through a link at Jill/txt.
Comments and Trackbacks
i think the uva website is already quite decent in terms of ui and usability .. just compare it to the other dutch universities. (mine's for example: leiden). ;-P
why is it these dutch universities cannot make up a decent website?
Posted by lok on March 30, 2002 @ 08:46
The UvA websites don't look all that bad, untill you try finding something. There probably is some logic behind it, but it's so convoluted that a mere human will not find what he's looking for... couple that with a pretty bad search engine and the fact that we've been transitioning from the old, non-DB driven websites for over a year and you might understand our anguish. The other day I spend almost an hour looking for the new digital expense forms and ended up going to the secretary, asking where I could find them on the site... and it turned out they were hidden on a server that only has an IP number and is not really referenced anywhere. You simply need the right URL to find those things.
Why? I don't know :)
Posted by Frank on March 31, 2002 @ 09:42
the last time i checked, the uva was at least using some kind of content management tool to manage their website. the problem with universities is that it is so decentralised - power at faculty level.. its politics that prevent a decent website.
Posted by lok on April 02, 2002 @ 18:35
Yes, they're using a CMS and yes, a big part of it is politics, but another part of it is simply bad design. Example: they have a navigation bar on the left, but there is no logic or order to what will appear in the navigation bar when you move through different parts of the website, even if you stay within the section of a single department.
Posted by Frank on April 08, 2002 @ 15:27
Post a comment
Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.