Dr. Destler responds to GeneSIS criticisms at Institute Council meeting | Infinity Quad

mikeaschneider · 1 month

I don't over-analyze what I type. The interface is difficult to use now, Oracle won't make it better, and openRIT will. I don't know what else to tell you.

mikeaschneider · 1 month

I would argue that there is a difference between pessimism and constructive criticism.

PeopleSoft is unusable. There's no denying that. We can pretend it isn't an issue, or we can make it clear to RIT and to Oracle that poor interfaces are not acceptable in 2012. Destler even mentioned improving the system as a result of this sentiment.

mikeaschneider · 1 month

I'm somewhat disappointed with the content of his response (he did relatively little to respond to the open letter), but kudos to Bill for always being proactive in responding to issues that students care about. You don't get that from most executives.

More than anything, I'm happy to see that people are having a serious discussion about user interfaces. Students are making it clear that the price we paid for PeopleSoft cannot be justified because it has a very poor interface. This is the thinking of tomorrow. Bravo!

mikeaschneider · 1 month

I respectfully doubt it. As far as I understand, PeopleSoft has been this bad for a long time. openRIT will very likely bring it a nice interface, though.

grlundahl · 1 month

I mean in the theme. He used to be in the lower right hand corner.

grlundahl · 1 month

The theme looks great. Better than all of the others by far. Congratulations to the designer.

On a related note, what ever happened to the Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man?

graff772 · 1 month

Usability and visual design are actually closely intertwined. People find attractive interfaces to be more usable even when they are not.

The point is this: The system is not usable. It is measurably not usable. Even someone who has read a basic book on design could easily point out several specific flaws with the system. A short discussion with faculty and students of human-computer interaction would have revealed this problem early in the process, but I doubt they were involved.

The administration is free to claim that the system is usable, but they are wrong.

graff772 · 1 month

Thanks for the interest in fixing this.

May I ask, how early and how often was user feedback taken into account in the construction of this system?

graff772 · 1 month

You are actually right on all counts. The current system is not usable, Microsoft Office is not usable, C is especially not usable (hence the recent trend towards more expressive system languages like Go), and assembly does not even attempt to be usable.

Usability doesn't measure the ease of learning to use a product, it measures the ease of using a product without instruction. In other words, we should not need a manual to use the new registration system any more than we need a manual to use an iPad.

You should really read The Design of Everyday Things or at least this summary of it.

graff772 · 1 month

Virtually no one educated in usability accepts the term "user error." The people entering courses are not stupid. They do not want to schedule courses at 1am. The software is to blame.

Mistakes like this would not occur in a well-designed, usable registration system.

edit: Downvotes? I can't imagine what about this is controversial.

momac7 · 1 month

Yup. Colors don't work well across cultures, though. Not everyone understands green to mean "go".

But you're right, even fewer people (none) understand blue to mean "full".

gkoberger · 1 month

Amen. RIT should have invested in an open-source solution from the start. Even contracting an outside company to build and open-source registration system would have been better than this.

Instead, they got suckered into yet another snake oil enterprise software gimmick. "Software is expensive. Pay us ten million dollars for a bad registration that no one will be allowed to improve."

We have needed this for a long time. Thank you for the initiative in actually getting it done.

momac7 · 1 month

-Circle, open class

-Square, closed

-Triangle, wait list

Sounds intuitive. If only we had three different words to signify open, closed, and waiting.

schneidy · 2 months

This.

I could have sworn Kate Gleason Hall was the engineering building. This must be why.

TheGrayCoats · 2 months

You might be right. But before today, did you know which first name referred to the dorm and which referred to the academic building? The names are far too similar to be useful in emergency situations like this.

TheGrayCoats · 2 months

Even if they did there would have been confusion. Before today, did you know which first name referred to the dorm and which referred to the academic building?

TheGrayCoats · 3 months

Ughhh. We've told you everything we know.

I didn't know. Thanks for the info!

TheGrayCoats · 5 months

For comparison: http://www.rit.edu/solutions/

yit · 5 months

Thirded.

Anyone looking for documentation should see this article about how the Salvation Army threatened to close its doors to protest gay rights legislation.

See also this other reddit post, with much more documentation.

skibum607 · 5 months

LOOKS LIKE THIS WAS DONE BY THE BEAUTIFUL SOLUTIONS TEAM

DeafShaman · 6 months

Rustic Village does have a lot of people. I doubt I'm the only one who drives, but I will probably drive less now that I know about the #24.

TheGrayCoats

TROPHY CASE

you'll need to login or register to do that

create a new account

login