“Sketch” an Idea

Oncourse was created to manage the multiple courses students have. Students need to 1) be able to understand the design and 2) they need to be able to quickly and easily access the information they want to.  Oncourse fails to do this and this type of failure frequently leads to frustration in its users who frequently have to use it whether they want to or not.  So when students reported that navigation was in vast need of improvement, I wanted to look at how our group could make the user be able to get from a start to a finish quicker and with more ease.

The “sketch” I came up with is a simple one.  Instead of tabs on the top of oncourse and tabs to the left of oncourse which require users to manuever through many different pages just go get to the page they want, why not minimize the amount of clicking they have to do? On the front page when you login to oncourse, I think on the top bar where there are currently tabs, there should be a Java applet of sorts that allows you to mouse over your classes which are automatically updated each semester and it’ll drop down a menu for wherever you want to go; ‘Resources’, ‘Syllabus’, etc.  This way the only click you ever have to do is to login and then to select where exactly it is you want to go. All your current classes appear in this list top bar so you can go anywhere you need to from this front page without having to cipher through other pages.

An example would kind of be like this;