Okay, so I have to write about a site that is not user friendly. Unfortunately most of my surfing and reading over the Web has to do with school and getting assignments or information for my class. Most of the sites I use if they are not user friendly are not surfed again.
One site that really drove me nuts last year and caused a lot of grief among my fellow teachers and acadamiens (is that a word?) was Center Point. We were force fed this program by our school district and told it was the wave of the future and to get used to it. It was cumbersome, not user friendly and just about the time you would learn how to navigate and get what you wanted the site managers (evil little trolls at a computer terminal I am sure!) would incorporate an update and the pages you just used the day before would be no longer available. It was maddening and also added more stress to our No Child Left Behind mentality (Don’t get me started on this unrealistic goal of our government….)
After all the cursing and whining and sniveling by us noncomputer literate teachers, (Odd we use computers darn near 24/7 in our classrooms but do not know enough to tell the operators what we need, or they just chose not to listen to us.) we were basically told to shut up and color. This was the wave of the future and the program that was leading the charge. Funny, when the company got gobbled up by another computer conglomerate Centerpoint disappeared and Power School came on line.
It was like a breath of fresh air, a program that did what we wanted, how we wanted, when we wanted it!! Hooray the day has been saved by someone (probably a former teacher) who knew enough to make the program accessible and user friendly. Not only for us teachers but also parents and the students. I know in my heart of hearts it was the elves who found those trolls and set their tails on fire and ran them all out of the bowels of computer purgatory.
Now if I can only find my gradebook so I can transcribe the correct scores into my computer program the world will be saved for at least one more day.
Death….to Center Point!
Great post and so funny.
My teachers at NPMS think that PowerSchool stinks and they so want they SO want the versatility of CenterPoint.
FYI: Centerpoint purchased PowerSchool (and several other online grading programs) and now have market cornered. The Centerpoint team then took the best of everything and enhanced PowerSchool, which in reality is fairly limited. It is the programming ability of Kevin Heneveld that the portal (where you take attendance) is as robust as it is. The gradebook on the other hand is hacker impervious and we have take what were given. Which gives me a giant headache, since I have library aides that are graded on a P/F basis…..and for some reason that can’t be done, so I have to manually override the grades.
Yes, I miss Centerpoint.
I do believe that NPMS was one of the test beds for this program and as such, you had Center point for two years. I may be wrong about this. Change is difficult and I understand your frustration. However I really believe that once you get more comfortable with Powerschool you will come to like it.
One of the pluses we realized already was midquarter grades. All we had to do was make sure our gradebook was up to date. There was no logging on, going to another page and verifying the grade was what you wanted. You can do all of that right inside gradebook without leaving the homepage screen..
Hope you learn to like our new School District enforced program.
Greg
This is a great discussion because it so perfectly illustrates the point of paying attention to design and usability– there is not a LOT of argument that the functions that Centerpoint provided are desirable, but there is a lot of dissatisfaction at the way that information was presented and the way the application works.
The moral of the story is that users won’t stick around for bad design and usability, unless they HAVE to and then it is a black eye for whoever is sponsoring the movement, no matter how well intended…