Like many of my peers, I use this website to check timetables for lectures and tutorials for various cross-faculty modules. During the Cors bidding and module selection period, several of my peers complained about the hassle and frustration of using this website when they are trying to view their timetables.
The flaw of this system shall be illustrated by a series of screenshots as seen beneath.
For instance, a peer of mine start by selecting the module BSP3001, click ‘add’, followed by either tutorial or lecture schedule options provided beneath. Each of the schedule, tutorial or lecture is provided separately, where at any point of time, you can only view one. More exasperatingly so is that when he hits the ‘Back’ button, it automatically clears his previous selection of the same module of BSP3001, thus he actually has to search for the module in the drop down list again, reselect and click the schedule that he wants to see.
This procedure gets very trying after a while as users usually do not check for one module only, and also if one forgets to copy down the schedule they have previously viewed, they would have to do the above procedures repeatedly.
When asked about their overall impression of this website, 4 out of 5 of my peers unconsciously linked it to the IVLE website where NUS have been consistently improving upon the older version. They felt that the same could be done for this website, where users’ opinions should be sourced and applied and those improvements to this website could happen in the “near future”, they described hopefully.
User experience is used to describe the overall quality of experience a person has when interacting with a product or a system. In this case, they experience has been one of exasperation and impatience with a system that does not seem to be able to understand their needs and habits. The functionality and ease of use is somehow lacking.
Furthermore, as my peers are like me, from the Arts and Social Sciences, our schedule is provided to us very differently, where when we click a module; we get to view both the lecture and tutorial schedule. Hence, generally when people get used to having something, they then start looking for something more, as the case with this website where constant comparisons are made with own faculty’s websites and the infamous IVLE. As with the improvements to IVLE, the users expect NUS websites to possess a certain degree of usability and design. Therefore, overall this website could be improved along the lines of criticism provided above and also perhaps, take into account the perspective of a student next time.
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