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Lukas Kocourek

Pursuit of better user experience of OU website.

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Am I the only one who think about Open University website as not user friendly? 

Has the website stuck in last decade?  Why everything has to be complicated ,hard to find and very time consuming? 

Bruce Lee said: 'simplicity is the key to brilliance' 

I vote for user interaction design to be redesigned to built modern user centred environment smile

Note: Designers don't ignore users!

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Me in a rare cheerful mood

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They do change it and every time they do so they add to the complexity.

Lukas Kocourek

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Hi Simon

I do agree about the complexity. Unfortunately they didn't add more positive user experience. 

Yesterday during our tutorial somebody mentioned that after 5 years of using it still having problems to find things and from my point of view I spent far more time with it than is needed . 

I wonder what it says about the user environment and designers.

What is experienced IT specialist point of view Simon? 

Me in a rare cheerful mood

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Apart from broken links, ambiguous links, repetition of structure, inconsistent look-and-feel, flakiness, the useless search facility, multiple implementations of support functions, not conforming well for large format monitors, illogical structure, different interfaces for different user groups, poorly designed fora interface, the inability to search comments in some sections and whatever other stuff that does not immediately spring to mind, it's fine.

If there was a lot less of the web site, it would be much easier to navigate and maintain.

But I don't do IT professionally any more, I'm just a user.

Simon Barton

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I agree with both of you. 

  Over these years I've gotten used to it, but using these conversation boxes can be a pain especially. Half of the buttons on my home page I've never used, and finding and bringing together study and instruction materials is time consuming, tricky and easy to miss out vital parts, as related items are flung about in different corners behind multiple button pushes.

  When we have nice effective systems such as facebook, this site seems really amateurish in design, especially for a business with so many high paying users, where IT is so central. And now the one bit of the study materials that works really well- the physical books, is being removed !

   Anyway, we manage, and presumably will be suitably trained to deal with poor systems elsewhere.