Assignment 1: Bad user experience

In this assignment we will analyse a bad user experience and what made it so bad. Below is a screencap of my example


-User Experience: Let us hear a day of Fushan, a year 3 student in Computational Science
+ He woke up at 8:00am and was excitedly waiting for the clock to strike 9:00am. He then could start the bidding process, which is a process to register for his courses in Nationaly University of Singapore through a computerize bidding system (Think ebaying for courses)
+ 9:00am He logged on, key in his User name, Password. It should be "smooth and straight forward", he thought
+ The server returned error
+ He tried 10 minutes later. He tried again 30 minutes later. And one hour later. He was getting frustrated. He had another class, but he decided to skip so that he could bid for his very important course that he didn't get earlier on.
+ 2 hours later, the site admin relreased a statement that the server had some error. "Please check again for further notice".
+ So he checked every hour, only get more and more frustrated.
+ 11:00pm, they finally announced they fixed it. However, Fushan couldn't log in until next morning 9:00am. That night he went to sleep with the same anxiety of whether he could get his module. He prayed to God "Please let me log in to CORS tomorrow"
+ This experience already happened to Fushan for at least 3 semesters in his University life.

- Lessons learned:
+ Servers do have problem once in a while. But we don't see sites that support thousands or millions of access worldwide like Google or Yahoo screw up that often.
+ However, this problem has occured almost every semester. In Fushan's year 1 he had know that the problem was caused by "All Freshmen are not sure of the system's rule and thought it was first come first serve. Hence they jammed the system". Any system like this must be able to support multi thousand concurrent accesses. Blaming the freshmen just won't do it.
+ There are peak hours of accessing because, as students, we tend to be really nervous about courses and sometimes some students just log in to see their bidding and make sure things are going right.
+ Anxiety and annoyance when you cant get your courses in a University and you are graduating soon is really unbearable.

- Suggestions (This is just blind shooting, some may have been done by the system administrators):
+ Have alternative servers and be able to switch if one jams. Maybe dedicate one server to a few Facs and another for the others.
+ Be prepared every semester, at every round
+ Have longer period and duration for each bidding round, to reduce the anxiety in students and thinning out the peak hours.
+ When problem occurs, don't blame the freshmen or student because they all logged in at the same time. As users they are supposed to have the priviledge to log on when they want.