Bucknell, How can I Easily View my Course Schedule?
One thing that every student needs, especially at the start of the semester, is a quick, easy way for them to view their schedule so they can make it to the right room at the right time. While this feature is very easy to access using Bucknell’s mobile app, it’s much harder to find when using myBucknell within your browser, which is probably why so many students elected to use no8.am when it existed and use coursicle.com now. The problem stems from a bad design within myBucknell and BannerWeb that makes it difficult for a student to find a comprehensive course schedule very easily.
From the photo above, the design flaw should become easy to recognize (and I’m not talking about just the unpleasing aesthetic of the website). This issue here for a student trying to access their schedule is that there are four different options (all highlighted) that all have have the word “Schedule” in them, but only one of them presents the schedule to the student in a way that is quick and easy for them to understand.
From clicking on the first highlighted link labeled “Student Schedule by Day & Time”, the user is greeted with their schedule presented in a calendar form, as shown in the screenshot above. This is the tab that the student is almost certainly trying to access, since it clearly displays their courses in the order they appear with the time and of location of each class. The schedule is easy to navigate and understand at first glance, and gets the job done well. While it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing schedule (other applications like the Bucknell mobile app and coursicle.com color code each course), it still fulfills its purpose.
The tab just below the one previously discussed is the “Student Detail Schedule” and is one of three other tabs that complete almost the same exact function. As you can see from the image above, this tab lists each of the student’s courses individually and if you were a student in a hurry trying to find out where your next class is, it may take some time to do that using this page. Additionally, this page offers almost no extra information to the student when you compare it to the first tab that displaying the schedule in calendar form, which just makes this tab redundant and useless.
Next is the “Concise Student Schedule” which, again, gives basically the same exact information as the previous tab, but still doesn’t do it in a way that makes it easy for a student to find out which course they have next like the calendar schedule did.
Finally, the bottom tab on the page is labeled “Course Schedule & Textbook Ordering” which offers no other functionality when compared to the previous 3 tabs mentioned besides the fact that there is a button that lets you order your course textbooks on it and it tells you if a course is remote or in person (a feature recently added). Again, this page doesn’t use a calendar design and makes it harder for a student to understand their class schedule.
Basically, the point being made here is that the information that composes all these tabs can be condensed down into a single tab that contains everything a student needs for their schedule in a way that displays it which is easy to understand. Right now many of the tabs are redundant and having to click in and out of tabs to get to the one you’re looking for slows down the functionality of the design. Also, the website could really use a touch-up in style to make it a better looking design.
