Yostivanich

Texas Tech Experts Exchange Screenshot

This is a screen­shot for an inter­nal Texas Tech site labeled “Experts Guide”. The site is designed so that experts in fields can say that they are experts in the field and gain recog­ni­tion and other peo­ple in Texas Tech can call upon the resources avail­able at Texas Tech to work on projects. Okay so far, inter­est­ing idea for a site and the acad­e­mia mind­set leans itself towards this idea that other peo­ple will just work for you for noth­ing, but lets not worry about the actual site idea. But more impor­tantly, the design of the site is just awful, espe­cially for sup­pos­edly being an experts site why didn’t they use an expert in web design (which I know Texas Tech has).

Design Mat­ters

Why don’t com­pa­nies ever fig­ure out that design mat­ters. Design plays a huge part in how use­ful that a site is to use and thus how many peo­ple use it and if peo­ple even keep using it after the ini­tial start up time. Very few sites, prod­ucts, etc are used which just bad design (Plen­ty­OfF­ish, Win­dows, etc), way more prod­ucts that are used sim­ply because of their design in spite of cheaper and eas­ier prod­ucts avail­able (iPod, Face­book, etc).

Let’s look at the design of this page alone. What’s going on here? This is the part where you can edit your pro­file and select top­ics that you are an expert in, every­thing from com­put­ers (spe­cial­iz­ing in about 10 areas, though no web design, but JAVA and LINUX (yes that is how TTU spelled it) and no other lan­guages, and includ­ing Com­pres­sion of Med­ical Images (WTF how is that a nec­es­sary spe­cial­iza­tion and not databases?).

What to Change

Mov­ing on the design of this page just bites, the page has no point. I have to do a whole page reload to see that I can’t add a topic that I’ve already added, rather than say a popup or a noti­fi­ca­tion next to where I clicked say­ing the same thing. Oh yeah and thanks for the return to top link that has no point as the page is so short that if I need a “return to top” link I’m view­ing this on some­thing with maybe my mobile phone and prob­a­bly smaller than that. Oh and does the “go back” link actu­ally worked and took me back to the page I was last at, nope instead I go back to the front page of the list of top­ics. eRaider sign out is in a stu­pid place as us the Google Search box. eRaider sign out should instead be in a bar across the top of the page let­ting you know that you are signed in and always where to click out at any moment (oh and it fits with the nor­mal Texas Tech design, just sayin). Google Search Experts, first off why do you have to label it as a Google Search Experts? Why not just label it Search and be done with it. Most peo­ple don’t care where the results are from and assume that that it will search just the site they are on, they just want to know where to search the site. Or if you are already going to wind up hav­ing a two line head­ing by keep­ing it called Google Search Experts, call it Google Search Experts Guide, makes way more sense.  Search should really be placed in the header image on the oppo­site end of the page from the TTU shield.

Com­pa­nies Focus on Design Please!!!!

Why can’t com­pa­nies just every once in awhile just take a look at their site and just try to use it and see that it bites. Maybe if you did you would have peo­ple actu­ally use it, (a grand total of 45 peo­ple signed up in the Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing) wow way to get peo­ple using your product.

I could lit­ter­ally write an arti­cle a month on all the sites/apps that Texas Tech has whose design just bites beyond stu­pid. I’ll be happy when com­pa­nies decide to learn some­thing about design and make some­thing that looks decent and works.