Critique #3––––UGA Athena
Since registration begins this month I thought I would look at Athena, UGA’ s student information program. I won’t be looking at the sign-in process, that’s a whole other bag of chips, so to speak, so today I’ll just concentrate on reviewing the process once you’re in the UGA Athena portal and have landed on the homepage after login (see above). I will then concentrate on registering for classes and specifically how one goes about finding classes they would like to take for specific semesters.
Objective: The main objective of Athena’s design is to get you to all your pertinent student information as fast and efficiently as you can. The most important time a student needs access to their information in Athena is when they are registering for classes and the beginning layout Athena provides is very intuitive for the user.
Experience: Once the student clicks on the Student navigation box, seven more boxes appear with a Registration box appearing at the top left corner, denoting it as the most important as its placement suggests. Athena does a good job with locating everything within the two left quadrants and even when they use the whole page the most important and most frequented information stays on the left side of the page, creating a pleasing, operational/navigational experience.
Skipping ahead a little bit, I’ll just mention that once you are in the registration page several options open up for you but the most important one for students preparing to register is the Look Up Classes box which is easily accessible and takes you to this page which has the Select by Term feature that has an easy-to-use scrolling feature to pick which semester you are looking up classes in.
So far, so good. Now to the real test=Finding Classes. After hitting the submit button you are taken to a Subject box featuring abbreviated disciplines with their full description. This is a great feature for all students, as younger students need the full description when learning what the acronyms stand for and more experienced students can just skip the description and go straight to the acronym they already know by heart, once again staying to the left.
Once you are in the subject, courses of the discipline you have selected appear on the left and you can easily scroll through them to find the one you are looking for based on their class number and name with the ever-important view sections box to the right to look at the most pertinent information, so far, so good. The page opens with the class’s schedule with all the other important information, e.g., crn number, instructor’s name.
Critique: I really like the user-friendly navigation Athena presents throughout this process and the other options on their page. The only hitch I’ve yet to find is the next part of this process. When I want to go back and find another class I’m not allowed to from this point. When I am back at the same page of classes as before and try to view the section of another class this pops up.
The only options I have left are two, yet they take me back to the same place to start over again. I can go back to the Select Term page seen above and start over which seems pretty far back in the process to have to start over again. The other option seems better, but instead leads me back to the same Select Term page. It is hitting this New Search button at the bottom of the view section page that has the class schedule and other information.
I thought I was correcting the error I had made before in hitting the back button and that now I would be properly taken to the correct Subject page, but alas, I was not. I was taken to the Select Term page again. This should be an easy fix and one of the 2 options should just carry you back one page, not several. I think Athena has a nice user-friendly application and has great navigational tools except at the very end of the registration process, but overall it is a great resource for students and is very helpful when registering for classes.
