No time for MyCSC redesign

Imagine your first week of classes. The first day, you wander around, vaguely lost, but by the end of the week, you know the pathways to get to your classes, the turns and the hallways, and where the nearest bathroom is.

Now imagine if your teacher changed classrooms and buildings the very next week, without any sort of warning.

This is the feeling I got the first time I logged onto MyCSC this summer. It was as though I walked into an empty classroom with nothing but a note pinned to the board “We’ve changed, good luck figuring out where we are.”

Now, I didn’t much like MyCSC to begin with, let’s be honest, it’s never been extremely “user-friendly.” However, at least it was usable. The new format, however, is nothing but a car-wreck.

When I first opened MyCSC, it was to find my Financial Aid. I was pretty excited to see that there was a link on the very first page that said “Financial Aid.” However, click any of these links, and rather than bringing you where you want to go, they bring you to tutorials. Upon later inspection I noticed that there is a very small note that says “Below is a list of tutorials that provide step-by-step instructions on how to use the portal.”

That’s considerate. You know what’s more considerate? Not needing tutorials on how to use a website.

Skip ahead to when I figured out that this was not the correct link. When you click on Student Dashboard, it goes to the enrollment page. Here you can find your schedule, but not a nice printable version. (I have yet to find that.) Here, however, I did find a tab that opened up financial aid.

However, when you open this tab, there are no links to accept financial aid. Instead, the link to accept financial aid is squished off to the side in the sidebar. When you finally open it, you have four pages to go through before getting to the page where literally all you have to do is check a pretty little box.

Of course, this is majorly different from the old Student Dashboard. The old student dashboard had your school schedule, academics, enroll/drop, a link to accepting financial aid, and a visible to-do list all in one convenient spot.

Now, with the new MyCSC I had absolutely no idea I still had things on my to-do list until the last possible minute. This is because it is buried in the sidebar. It’s there, but it’s certainly not easy to find.

Finally, I was able to figure out my to-do list, accept my financial aid, and somehow put together my schedule.

However, I felt like I had to jump through more hoops than a circus worker.

What is with that? Stuff like signing up for classes, filling out financial aid, and simply looking at your school schedule shouldn’t be so difficult.

It is so much more important that our website be user-friendly than look nice. It seems as though those who run MyCSC have forgotten that the most important purpose of this website is to help students. Instead, it’s making students’ lives harder.