Bad Designs on Campus - Submission
Web Mail Fail(ure)!
Problem description: The interface of the email system has
a minor but terribly annoying flaw. Whenever a student or faculty
checks their mail, the mail webpage must be loaded (mail.umich.edu).
There is no login option. The user must click to a second page to
enter their user name and password. Sure, there are some options on
the first page, but what portion of people who load that page need them
instead of the log in? 1 out of 1,000?
If each of 40,000 students checks their email 3 times per day and
spends 5 seconds clicking to a second screen, then this web page design
is wasting 167 man hours PER DAY. Think of all of the community
service or Guitar Hero that could be accomplished during this time!
(This excludes the wasted bandwidth of sending 120,000 extra daily page
requests.)
Proposed solution: The solution is pretty self-explanatory (see picture)… move the login to the main page!
