Agile, Contemporary, Adaptable, Page Not Found
Agile, Contemporary, Adaptable, Page Not Found
We asked - how come UMass Boston's new website sucks so badly? The Chancellor replied.
There are times in our lives when things are bad. Like, REALLY bad. So bad that we think we hit rock bottom and things just can’t get any worse. And then, just as we’re about to lose hope - something happens and shows us that we were wrong and that things can, indeed, get worse.
Case in point: UMass Boston’s new and dreadful website, launched days before the academic year started, just in time to thoroughly confuse the faculty and the influx of incoming students. Not that the previous site was great, but it was functional. Sort of.
The new site was hailed by both students and faculty as one of the worst things that have happened to our campus in recent years (and if you’ve been reading our modest venue for a while, you know the competition is tight).
Where do we start? The home page’s moving picture is guaranteed to make your head spin and eyes hurt; important information concerning programs, faculty and students disappeared - including faculty profiles and course listings; many links are broken; the ticket system to restore and fix problems is severely delayed, and the whole maintenance and update process, which used to be handled by individual academic units, is now centralized at the hands of the talents who designed the disaster.
So bad it is, that the Faculty Council passed a resolution requiring that departments/units should be able to control, edit, and maintain their webpages, like it was before.
In reply, our Chancellor penned a memo to the Faculty Council. The pdf is attached but you don’t have to read it, because we provide you with an Administrative-to-English translation, free of charge:
Dear colleagues,
Thank you for the opportunity to let me conduct a one-sided reproach masked as a dialog. Launching a new website is a massive undertaking. It also represents a significant change for all of us at UMass Boston. We have shown you over and over again that we are neither good at massive undertakings, nor at making significant changes. Hence, as expected, we failed miserably. However, our motto is: never admit to failure, never apologize and never engage if you can deflect. So let the excuses start:
Our previous website had been in use for over a decade and was getting outdated. The development of the new site drew from years of research and collaborations with professionals in the higher education sector, aiming to provide us with an experience that is more contemporary, agile, adaptable and other buzzwords that I don’t understand but our marketing team kept using and I didn’t want to look stupid. It’s strange, as I’m usually quite good with buzzwords no one understands.
And now, after two years of hard work on our part, you people come and tell me that all this is not enough and you want a website that also FUNCTIONS! Not only that, you want an IT team that solves problems with a reasonable response time! You want a team that can edit and update the site! You want to include academic programs, information for students and faculty profiles on the website! Whoa, that’s A LOT to ask, and it’s news to us. Where were you when we did our market research and focus groups two years ago? The audacity!
OK, OK. Don’t yell. We are willing to go out of our way to make some cosmetic changes. Whatever makes you
shut uphappy. We’ll even hire… what did you call it… IT people to handle tickets? Interesting… in my days only trains and theaters had tickets. Oh well.Just because I have to end my letter with empty niceties, I want to thank the Faculty Council and all our faculty and staff for their feedback, collaboration, and continued help during the development of the new website. For the times!