This Is All Too True

[dr_phil_physics]

Once Again XKCD Proves Itself Exactly Right

How many times have I run into this on so many university and college websites?



This.

Dr. Phil

Comments

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Can we send this to my son's university? It takes 5 screens to get to the financial aid page.

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

Sadly, all the IT guys and gals will snicker over this, but the overlords of the universities won't see and won't get it. (sad-grin)

Dr. Phil

[laurie-gail.livejournal.com]

Brilliant Dr. Phil, brilliant.

And though I'm over here in eastern Michigan, I have you western Michigan folks in my thoughts as you deal with your oil spill. Nasty stuff.

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

I just can't wait for the smell to hit where US-131 crosses the Kalamazoo River.

Dr. Phil

[steve-buchheit.livejournal.com]

That's not limited to university websites, sadly. Fighting my own battle with "we want to say" and me responding, "our customers don't care, they want the product info, let's make that the MAJORITY of our site."

Amen!

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed. This is the downside of Web 2.0 or whatever; online sites in the age of dial-up BBS and the early years of the Internet may have been ugly, but they were functional. Functional enough that even when you didn't see what you were looking for at first, you could often deduce where it would be from the structure of an address or directory.

These days? Sure, campus (and business and government) sites are pretty, but if you want useful information it's either absent or buried in some offshoot of a submenu in a sidebar.

Arrgh!

-Eric (not really anonymous)

[mgsmurf.livejournal.com]

That's so true. Actually I think a lot of these links are buried at the bottom and hard to find place on my college's website. Luckily the intraweb for staff/faculty on campus is better managed.

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

A long time ago I was in an office that had an old Mac running System 7 which had a copy of Lynx -- very useful for finding the links, since it was text only. (grin) Alas, too much text these days is actually pretty graphics images and not searchable and copyable, you know, text.

Dr. Phil

[wendyb-09.livejournal.com]

My peeve is hosiptal, doctor's offices and various court websites.

If I'm on their site, I want one thing...contact information. My needs are simple - how do I get client medical records, file various things, contact the judge's paralegal directly. I need one phone number or one email address. The contact us page doesn't always have that!!

Do like the school one though, last year this time I was researching future tuition, room & board for a sports agent, so he knew how much to ask for in scholarship money for MLB draft picks. Heaven forbid that information should all be on one page...

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

They don't want you to compare prices, since education isn't anything that one, you know, buys.

Dr. Phil

[nerwengreen.livejournal.com]

Heh, reminds me of my last two ISP pages, Comcast and Bellsouth. Both have these glitzy ADHD-inspired flashy news type fronts, and it takes some looking around to figure out how to get to your account info.

In the case of Bellsouth, they actually had three slightly different useless fronts overlaid on top of each other, with links that crossed over to each other. Even the phone reps couldn't find anything in it.

[dr-phil-physics.livejournal.com]

Genius!

Provide the customer with all the information at once on the page -- and then keep the whiny bastards from complaining to you and using it.

Someone got a promotion, I bet.

Dr. Phil

PS- or else somewhere there is a note that "This web site works best with Internet Explorer 4.01 only."