Alumni LENS: So close, yet so far

msu-alumni-lens-is-a-major-user-fail

My first professional job out of college was with Michigan State University Outreach & Engagement (UOE for short). One of my primary tasks throughout my six years there was the maintenance of MSU Statewide (formerly the Statewide Resource Network, or SRN), a massive database of as many continuing ed and academic outreach events as we possibly could find by manually crawling every single MSU website possible.

The SRN had its share of problems. A big one is the fact that this may be the first time you’ve heard of it. In fact, looking at the site right now, I have several immediate SEO recommendations. But it was as thorough as it possibly could be, given the limited time we devoted to it.

By contrast, there was the MSU Alumni Evening College, which offered exactly what it sounds like: a set of courses (ranging from one lecture to a semester’s-worth of sessions) that coincided with the academic calendar. I took two courses with them (Intro to Figure Drawing and Intro to Ceramics). I enjoyed both greatly and had every intention for signing up for other classes. An archery course had caught my eye, for example.

I say “took” vs. “have taken” very intentionally, for the record, because the Alumni Evening College appears to be no more. Instead, we now have Alumni LENS, or Lifetime Enrichment for Spartans. Rather than offering a set of unique courses, it’s pretty much just an aggregate of all the continuing ed and academic outreach events offered by MSU. In short, it’s MSU Statewide, only with personnel, money, and marketing behind it.

Except that, putting them side-by-side, I actually like the SRN better. And that’s not just personal bias talking. It’s not as pretty, but side-by-side, the SRN’s user experience is, I think, better.

A Failed Consideration of the User

Alumni LENS claims to have its alumni at heart. They want to provide resources for alumni who aren’t within driving distance. That’s fine; feel free to list all the online learning opportunities you want. Just remember that there are still people who took your courses as they existed.

In the great purge of the Evening College, it looks like most of the custom courses are gone. No more Intro to Figure Drawing, no more ceramics. No more archery. Instead, there are foreign language offerings…for preschoolers. (Oh wait! UOE offers that set of listings too! It’s called Spartan Youth Programs.)

Again, I’m not complaining that they opened up the kinds of courses they’re offering. It may duplicate the SRN, but it has a lot more publicity than the SRN ever did. But it should have been a both/and, at least at first. Here’s your Chinese for Toddlers program and here’s your Intro to Ceramics. They could have easily courted both the local alums who, like me, had been taking the occasional course as well as offering all of the online options. Instead, they appear to have alienated the locals–the people who had been trained to use them–and instead focused on courting alums nationwide–the people who had been trained to not look at the Evening College offerings. Seriously, Spartan LENS, would it have killed you to offer both?

A Failed User Experience

One of the first things I did when I looked at Alumni LENS was to try to find my ceramics class. I hope it’s not there, because if it is, I failed that usability test pretty badly. First, there’s no table of contents, no way to see just one massive list of everything they offer. Oh, and you’re stuck with 5 search results per page at most. I mean, who doesn’t want to flip through 35 pages of search results to see if maybe the thing you’re looking for is buried on the last page? Sure, you can narrow it by category, but the most popular ones still have six pages of results…and if you’re just skimming, you don’t want to have to look through that many pages.

Second, the error feedback is problematic. Experiment with this yourself: type in “astronomy.” One result, right? Now type in “ceramics.” 34 pages of results. Do you see the error feedback? It’s there, in a nice drab box that blends into the background. Does it look prettier than having a bright yellow box, or giant text that says “0 Results Found. Check these out instead”? Yes, but the point of error feedback is not to look pretty. In fact, if it looks so pretty that you don’t even register it when you know it’s supposed to be there, you’re doing something wrong.

Now search for “ceramics” on the SRN. Behold, a good ol’ fashioned “No results found.” Nothing else being shoved down your throat. It’s almost a relief.

Bonus: What does LENS even mean?

I accidentally stumbled on the Alumni homepage in pursuit of a cover image for this post and had another usability fail. No, seriously. Go to the Alumni homepage and see if you can figure out where their lifelong learning programs are hidden. Without the context of this blog post, would it have occurred to you to click on the teeny, tiny link that says “Alumni LENS”? No? Me neither. I mean, it sounds like “Alumni Spotlight,” like you’re going to hear stories from alumni if you click on that link. Six months from now, I’ll probably revisit the page and LENS will probably be out of the carousel and I’ll probably have to come back here, to this blog post, because I’ll remember it has some random name now and it’s easier to find in my own archives than on their website that is supposed to push traffic to it.

Evening College was misleading. I get that. Not all courses were in the evening, and some of them were online, and you wanted to reach a broader range of people. But at least it had meaning. LENS, on the other hand…well, put it this way, I look forward to hearing if people think it’s a listing of MSU alumni eyeglass manufacturers. We at Covenant Eyes can totally commiserate with you on that one.

Alumni LENS: You can do better.

You can.  You have the money and the personnel. You can probably easily re-add the courses the rest of us loved. You can run the usability tests. It really doesn’t take much to change things up successfully. Just, you know, talk to your users, past and present, before you do.

3 Comments on “Alumni LENS: So close, yet so far

  1. The acronym stands for “Lifelong ENrichment for Spartans.” I found this someplace random on their site when I had to write a blurb about its launch and was digging around for info.

    Sometime, we should chat about what I’ve learned about coordination within the university. 🙂

  2. Ah…Yes, I suppose I should have been clearer. I have no doubt they put a lot of thought into the acronym, and I get that “Evening College” is misleading for the direction they want to go…but if you’re looking for alumni education activities and have never heard of LENS, you’re going to be pretty confused, and quite possibly fail at your goal

    As a side note, I don’t blame them for duplicating the SRN; they probably didn’t know it existed. But I would have expected to do better than this.

  3. Meh, I meant that not as praise of the acronym so much as an answer to the question. I don’t know that yet another acronym is terribly helpful to the image/awareness problem they seem to be addressing.

    The word that has come to describe MSU’s structure for me is “decentralized.” That’s a nice way of saying that it can be hard to get different units to communicate or play together if they don’t want to, even if it would be in their best interests overall to cooperate.

    Think of it as a confederation of separate unit-states that largely do their own thing, but share common processes and interests in certain areas. USA, circa 1779.

    Also, thanks for the link to the SRN – was nice to peek through and see if they had anything I didn’t know about in my areas of interest.