By Benjamin Solomon, Staff Writer
Every morning, students and professors log into the university website to use a variety of services essential to taking classes at UMass Dartmouth. The main page at my.umassd.edu recently received a make-over.
There was a period of downtime during which a placeholder page was used, which only included some of the important links located on the QuickLaunch drop-down menu.
What has changed in the my.umassd.edu page is mostly some drop-down menus being moved around and elements being resized. There are different shades of blue and yellow as well.
Most noticeably, the Outlook widget works again. This ceased to function shortly after the email service transitioned from an outdated version of Zimbra to the up-to-date Microsoft Outlook. This means people can once again view their email without opening up the email page.
The Torch asked some students their opinion of the changes. Some seemed ambivalent.
“It’s not bad. I see what they are trying to do with it,” responded Allan Pilch, a senior political science and history major.
“I guess it looks fine. It looks like every other modern website,” said Richard Harrison, a senior computer engineering major.
“I don’t think it’s a big deal, I can find Office, Outlook, MyCourses, and COIN. That’s all I need to find,” said Brent Rubell, a senior computer engineering major.
To some then, the changes to the website are merely inconsequentially aesthetic. But not to all.
According to senior physics major Connor Kenyon, the revamp is not so great. “The new look of the my.umassd page is both frustrating and inefficient. The new layout moved simple menus that were easy to navigate to hide the most important function, logging out, to be hidden behind a tiny menu mixed with a bunch of other useless links that I honestly don’t think anybody will use.”
He continued, “additionally, there are other important things that are still left where students have to hunt them down, like ReservIt and MyOrgs. This new interface also highlights pointless garbage that nobody ever uses, like the upcoming events. There are so many other ways to hear about events that people use, and the my.umassd page is not one of them.”
“The announcements are okay but are still pretty infuriating because it’s all things that nobody cares about that shows up. It would’ve been appreciated if the school got feedback and asked if students wanted a change to the system that seemed to work fine before.”
Myumassd.edu is often changing. The UMass Dartmouth community will continue to anticipate more changes as the time comes. Students should consider becoming part of the design team for the umassd.edu webpage, so that some of the student body’s voices may be heard.