Mark Greenfield

Our campus is in the process of implementing a new student system.  After a lengthy assessment, we selected PeopleSoft and we are now in the early stages of implementation.  During the assessment, I was a vocal advocate for selecting a product that was both usable and accessible.

This week I was sent the online training materials to familiarize myself with PeopleSoft. I’ve been using Chrome as my browser the last couple of weeks and when I opened up the link to the training materials, I got the following message:

“The Player requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later.”

I tried to open the site using Firefox, Opera and Safari, and got the same message. (Yes, It works fine in IE.)  I have a very bad feeling about this. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come with our student system.

If anyone of you have expereince with PeopleSoft, I’d love to hear from you regarding how valid their code is.  I sure hope that people won’t be forced to use IE.

In addition to the three presentations I did at the Innovative Educators conference last week, I did a session critiquing several sites volunteered by attendees. While these reviews focused on all aspects of what goes into a great site, usability was what everyone was most interested in.

It amazes me that many higher ed sites continue to have serious usability issues. For example, one site we reviewed prevented someone using Firefox from completing the admissions application. Opening the “Apply Now” link resulted in an error message saying “WARNING! Unsupported Browser!” I also shared an example from my school where the housing request form was recently made available online. Here is some of the text from the instructions:

System Requirements :
You MUST ONLY use IE v 6.0+. You cannot use a Mac. Incompatible browsers may prevent some pages from being displayed. Do not use Firefox.

I guess we don’t want any Mac users or Firefox users living on campus!

I wish these were isolated cases, but the majority of higher ed sites I visit have usability issues. So my questions for the group is why does higher ed continue to struggle with usability? I have my own thoughts, but I would love to hear yours.

I came across this great video on Seth Godin’s blog. To get the full effect, take a look at the video before reading the remainder of this post. The video lasts 1:09.

One of my favorite ideas from the book Don’t Make me Think is tunnel vision. From Chapter Two, the first Fact of Life is that we don’t read web pages, we scan them. We are in a hurry. Web users are like sharks who need to keep moving or they will die. We don’t look at an entire web page, we focus on the task at hand or our personal interests. Everything else is white noise. For those of you who haven’t read the book, here is a link to Don’t Make Me Think - Chapter Two, including an illustration of what designers build and what users see.

So think twice about all the extra bells and whistles you add to your designs. IMHO, the simpler the better.