Even with the brand new system or design or whatever they called it, it still sucks. It looks like crap and performs just at you would expect, like crap.
My first impressions: it's yellow, really yellow. I understand our school colors are yellow and black, but seriously, there is a limit to my daily dose of yellow. Beyond the simple lack of color contrast, the sections are blocky, clunked together, and not in consistent style across the screen. It's just amateurish for them to put out something as unpolished as this.
From a designer's perspective, what also sucks is the page refreshing and ill-thought navigation menus and architecture. With Web technologies developing so fast and the increasing use of AJAX (which allows for updating pages without completely reloading the page), it seriously makes me wonder what the thought process was behind this new version of PAWS. Perhaps it was merely done to annoy us college students - just to see my favorites in the menu I have to reload the entire page I'm on. That is, without a doubt, bull.
The next version of PAWS better not suck as much as this one or its predecessor; it's a real irritation to sit through dated technology when the better, faster technologies are readily available. Educational Web services are just left in the dust it seems.
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I just looked at the new PAWS for the first time after reading this and you are totally right. It's awful. It's confusing and not very intuitive. It's not clear to me at first what I should click on to find the things I want. And the points you make about AJAX and about how ugly it is are good too.
Also consider how much better Amazon is than the campus library web page. Amazon lets you search much more efficiently and gives you much more information about books you're looking for, including letting you "search inside" for many titles. On the campus library web page I often mistakenly search for an author using the title search or for a title using the author search. Why is this necessary when Amazon lets you search however you want and almost always turns up the right thing?
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