The new Quest Student Information System update is no more than atrocious, especially when it took them years to plan for this change. Just from this first page after signing in, I already have issues with it.

• Page title: “Campus-facing registry content” – whatever that means.
• Content title: “Heng-Chun’s Student Center” – there exists something in my PeopleSoft profile called preferred name
• Font size – Gosh! it’s tiny!
• Tabs – Is there something missing in that space? The fixed height is really unnecessary.

Rants continuing after the break.

Ok hmm… well the left-hand menu seems pretty important. I guess I’ll start with that. *click*…. Great. The only item in the menu brings me back to this screen. Why is it even THERE? Well, let’s just get rid of it first.

I am just going to tour this thing in order I guess. *clicks on “My Academics”*. Of course, the left hand menu will pop back out again because there’s no such thing as remembering preferences. I’ll just go ahead and hide that again…

Random white spaces here and there. They also seem to be really confused about those tabs. I guess we can differentiate the main tabs and the “sub-tabs” by making the sub-tabs all lower case instead of capitalizing the first letter. Very subtle, but everyone will pick that up… right?

Let’s move on to my grades.

Good stuff. They got rid of the links. Let’s make them radio buttons and a button instead. Trying to keep the UI testing co-ops busy?

By the way, the radio buttons are not labelled by the term. Accessibility fail.

We’ll skip the grades screen, as they have less information than ever.

Transcripts? Jammed right in from the old system. Aside from the new “summary” that they provide from each term, they replaced the requirement designations with abbreviations. Now no one will know why you took that extra course! Hey! You win some and you lose some.

Let’s now move on to my favourite part of all: course enrollment. I heard that there’s something called Courselect some student made because he got ticked off by the whole course enrollment process.

No huge change here. But there’s a curious looking link to the section!

Nice to see that I am still ahead of my times. With links to courses in enrollment requirement in Courselect. =P

Let’s try to look for a course to add to my schedule now…

Yay! Meaningful searching criteria! By the way, clicking on the arrow does not expand the “tab”. It only expands when you click on the title. Intuition win.

The search result shows you everything! And clicking on the section class number leads you to a description of the course. But, you can’t add the course here of course… that’ll just be too simple.

You would never “search” for a course just before you are about to “add” it. Right everyone?

Let’s go to the real Add course page.

Let’s see if our students in Waterloo are really sharp. We’ll flip the sorting order of the term into the opposite order than the rest of the system. Very nice.

Look! It’s that familiar looking search screen again. But an astute student would understand that this is completely different than the search that we were on before. Clearly.

Ah… there’s that button that I’ve been searching for all my life. Now I can add courses!

And that’s about it for the changes. The rest of the stuff are just modules jammed in from the old version. Copy and paste FTW.

Summary

There’s nothing much I can say about this really nasty looking UI that breaks accessibility on almost all levels not to mention the lack of an intuitive user interface.

I have some mixed feelings about this change to Quest. I am disappointed in seeing that a roughly two year effort by the full-time staff at Registrar’s Office resulted in a product that still belonged in the same category of quality as its previous version.

On the other hand, I should celebrate such re-design failure as it is currently driving more student traffic than ever to uwlive.ca on all fronts. I am delighted to report that as of last night, we’ve achieved the highest single day traffic record in anyway you want to measure it (visits, page view, absolute unique visitors).

Based on historical data, the traffic handled during the regular enrollment period is half of the traffic to be handled during the first week of the following term. Looks like I have much more optimization and load-balance work ahead to be done in August!