Courses At Brown Design Critique
As any current Brown student will know, Courses at Brown, or “CAB” for short, is a website that we must interact with while shopping for courses in both the Spring and Fall. It was released recently. As such, the design is seemingly modern. It has nice and smooth animations and a decent color palette. Animation has been gaining favor in the web design space and the designer of this site incorporated it subtly but well. I consider these features of the user experience good because they are not obtrusive to my efficiency and are pleasing to the eye. As a user, I am confident that my experience was changed for the better by these aspects of the website.
However, workflow in the page is not up to snuff, in my opinion. First, most of the home screen is occupied by a picture, which admittedly looks nice, with suggested courses to consider under it (Figure 1). CAB designer: I am probably not going to take a course displayed in by far the worst color on the page (a gross beige), whose font color is so similar that those who operate with high resolutions would probably have to squint to see. The obtrusive picture and suggestions have little value in advancing my goals of finding and registering for courses. In fact, they force me to only focus on the left quarter of the page, in which I find a very usable search menu.
Now, I have to mention the calendar-like schedule visualizer (Figure 2). It is horrendous. The rectangular, futuristic design worked in the search bar because the elements were actually labeled well. In this implementation, the labels (that used to not exist entirely) overflow and become truncated by the blocks representing days. This choice is both inconvenient for the user and ugly. I assume that the choice to make the calendar look clean and minimal was to decrease the headache of a cluttered interface. As was established in class in the Yahoo Japan webpage, sometimes clutter is preferable, whether out of necessity or precedent. That is the case with a calendar. There is certain information that must be present, or else the entire calendar is useless.
The designer chose graphical assets that are, for the most part, simple and elegant. These are cost-effective and easy to produce. The page is earth-toned and relaxing, which I appreciate; it appeals to a student body that will inevitably be nervous about finding the right courses.
The audience is young and experienced with web interaction, so the modern interface was chosen to provide a familiar and attractive environment, presumably. As far as learnability is concerned, I would rate the website well. It is simple to use. There are intuitively positioned arrows and labels. It is hard to miss functionality on the page. Upon watching a tutorial, it is clear that much thought was put into filtering classes to give students a complete representation of their options. For example, the “courses I can take” filter does not shed options that require an override code (something that would be highly inconvenient because one may be able to obtain an override code for the course anyway and as such, it should be available as an option).
I think the interface is efficient. It flows left to right as you progress through the different panes of options, such as carts, search results, calendar display, etc. It could probably be improved, though. The site is also certainly memorable, for a mixture of positive and negative reasons listed above. Below are pictures of the site’s home screen and some subsequent screens.


To improve the design, I would change the home screen to have a more central, interactive search space, with all information displayed on most resolutions (1200p and up or so) without the need for a scrollbar. The color scheme would remain, as would the simplistic design and color palette. This search would then become the originally designed bar once an initial search was completed and results were being displayed.
The calendar would be changed to be simpler and more readable, and while the user was interacting with the website after an initial search, the layout of the original website would largely take hold. See Figure 3 below to visualize these changes.
