Clustered: A Need to Redesign the Message Center’s Mobile Experience

The message center is Bucknell’s go-to place for updated campus news, events, programming, and business. Currently, students and faculty of the Bucknell community can see the message center via email or go through myBucknell. The mobile design when accessing the message center through myBucknell is a clustered page that doesn’t have the most friendly user experience.

When I was navigating this tool, I wanted to see if anyone had an extra futon for my dorm. I scrolled through endless feeds without the ability to filter out what I was looking for. The filter button is right next to the “add post” button so my thumb will always slip and click the latter. Furthermore, unlike the emails, the message center through myBucknell doesn’t organize content posted in the feed. Trying to find other students selling or giving away a futon was difficult and I had to see other unrelated content such as campus activities. This service has a slight improvement in terms of categorizing with colored-coded labels but often times the colors are almost similar so it’s hard to differentiate one message category from another (ex. pink and a little more pink). The problem also is that there is no legend that represents the colors with the categories. Another slight note, the display of “64,487 items” is unnecessary. Nobody is going to search through outdated messages on the feed and seeing that number when you land on the platform seems very overwhelming. That space could perhaps be used to add a legend.