Considering that there are an uncountable number of horrible user interfaces out there in the world, pinpointing which user interface is the worst is no easy task. But based on my own personal experience using course registration systems from several universities, Texas A&M University (TAMU)’s course registration system on their Howdy online system is a wonderful candidate for worst user interface.
Gah! I only care about the College Station campus!
The first issue with the system is that when you first begin registering for courses, the system gives a scroll list of course schedules for three TAMU campuses: College Station, Galveston, and Qatar. Fortunately, the system’s first option is for the College Station campus, which is only one extra button click overhead for students at the TAMU main campus, but it becomes more of hassle to scroll down for students from the other TAMU campuses and even more so for those looking up courses from previous semesters. Since Howdy already knows your student information, it should reference the student's current campus instead of listing three campuses. The way it's currently done is pure laziness on the UI programmers.
Another issue is that the system only gives one option to navigate the courses by department, which is by its course abbreviation. Unfortunately, if the student doesn’t know that abbreviation for the department which they like to enroll in, that student would need to make an estimate guess of that course’s department abbreviation. It also doesn’t help when the course titles itself are displayed visually ugly since they are truncated and arbitrarily abbreviated when the title is long, and also needlessly capitalized in its entirety.
What does Coll Systems & Models even mean?!
And why can't I view multiple courses?!
One of the most awful aspects of the system is that it’s impossible to conveniently open additional browser tabs or windows for several courses simultaneously to quickly register and compare information from multiple courses. The reason is that courses are selected with the click of a button instead of a link. With the use of buttons, students can only view and register courses one at a time. If a student would like to compare the times and places of multiple classes, the simplest solution is to manually open up several browser tabs or windows, log into Howdy multiple times, and proceed through the entire process to open up each desired course. Alternatively, one could select multiple departments from the department selection scroll list, but this assumes the user knows how to do this advance feature or opts to do an advanced search (yet another additional step). In short, this is very unnecessary work that could have been alleviated by replacing buttons with links.
Lastly, the main issue with registering for courses is when the course is full. Since the system has a lack of an automatic waiting list feature, students are forced to either rely on luck for a spot to open at the same time they are logged into the system, or physically visit the appropriate person from the department and request to be put on a waiting list. Automatic waiting lists are features implemented in course registration systems at other major universities, and so it’s mind boggling that this contemporary feature is still not implemented at TAMU.
My only guess as to why this system turned out the way it did was because the developers were lazy and chose to build the system with the least amount of effort instead of focusing on how to make using the site easy and intuitive.
My only guess as to why this system turned out the way it did was because the developers were lazy and chose to build the system with the least amount of effort instead of focusing on how to make using the site easy and intuitive.
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