Thomas Attebery
Staff Writer
BengalWeb, a platform vital to student life at ISU, was updated at the beginning of the Spring 2017 semester. According to the update notice on BengalWeb’s login page, the look has changed, but the content is the same, and part of the point of the change was to improve mobile user’s experience of the site.
Kimberly Channpraseut, Manager of Enterprise Applications, was one of those responsible for planning and carrying out the upgrade.
“What led to the upgrade was the company that develops the software that runs BengalWeb changed the technology on their side, so we were wanting to stay current with the technology trends as well as modernize the design of the BengalWeb software,” she said. “Really what went into the project was we had to install new servers and upgrade the software that BengalWeb runs on, and part of that was modernizing the design to work better on mobile devices…creating a more minimalist look, but also making sure it’s responding depending on what kind of device you might be using it on.”
Brayton Hunt, an ISU freshman, said, “I only had the old one for half a semester, so it didn’t seem like that big of a change to me. I thought it looked cooler, and it was easier to navigate.”
Hunt says she did notice the difference in terms of how the site works on mobile devices.
“I didn’t use it on my phone at all until they did the update. The drop-down menus are easier, and I can zoom in and stuff,” she said.
One significant change to the site is the switch to using icons instead of words to access the site’s different tabs such as Academic Tools and Finances. This is part of the minimization that Channpraseut mentioned.
“It just takes a second. When they did the update I was like ‘Where did the words go?’ and then it just took a couple times of clicking on the wrong icon to get it. I think the icons represent well enough what the words were that after a couple times messing up you get it.”
Morgan Betts, another ISU student, agreed. “Yeah, I sort of struggled with that at first, but then after playing around with it for about five minutes I got used to it,” Betts said.
“As part of the upgrade we worked with some different groups on campus. We worked with the university’s technical operations to plan and roll out the upgrade, and we worked with Marketing and Communications to incorporate ISU’s branding standards into the design,” Channpraseut said.
“We also worked with a group of students, faculty, and staff for feedback, and we took some of that feedback into account as well as feedback we’ve heard since the upgrade.”
Channpraseut says that feedback was mostly positive. Some people, however, have had problems with the changes.
“I kind of think it was a waste of time and money to be honest,” Betts said. “When I noticed there wasn’t anything really different about it except the way it looked I thought ‘Why did they bother?’” Betts said.
“I think when you do any sort of upgrade there’s always the potential to discover some glitches and problems you didn’t anticipate,” Channpraseut said. “Some people went ‘We’ll it’s different’ and just had an issue with that.”
The issue of icons replacing words was a large part of the feedback.
“That is one of the issues we are aware of and that we’ve looked into a way to possibly in the future add words into the mobile site,” Channpraseut said.
Overall, Channpraseut believes that the update was successful and did what it was supposed to.
“I think in general it’s been very positive. People have said it’s easier to move around, and a lot better on tablets especially.”
