Courtesy of ccc.rochester.edu
This summer, the Campus Club Connection (CCC) — the virtual hub of student organizations — underwent a marked transformation. Although some of the updates were necessary and welcome improvements, there are some features that hold the new website back from its full potential.
One positive change is the bulletin board feature, an interactive display that dons flyers for upcoming events and acts as a web-based version of the banners in Wilson Commons. Clicking on a flyer will open it in a larger screen, providing more details about the event. This addition to the CCC is sure to enhance the way on-campus groups employ publicity.
Just beneath the bulletin board is another new feature: a constantly updating feed of upcoming events — an accurate indicator of the huge number of activities on campus and how often new events arise.
For all the positives about these two new features, however, they fall victim to the one problem that plagues the CCC overall: the way it’s organized. At a school that boasts over 240 diverse student groups — an impressively large array compared to the size of the student body — a home page that only highlights a handful of groups shouldn’t necessarily be the first access point on the website.
It would be more beneficial for the CCC homepage to display the bulletin board and newsfeed accompanying a list of all the available student groups, or perhaps alongside the search options already in place on the “organizations” landing page, which houses groups’ individual profiles.
Another organizational issue is the fact that the format for the website changes when users switch among the homepage, the organizations landing page and specific group profiles. The location of the available menus on each of the aforementioned pages fluctuates between the top left corner and a vertical sidebar on the left side.
Most change is initially hard to acclimate to, but organizational drawbacks and inconsistencies make it even harder.
There are a number of smaller usability issues — such as a group’s inability to arrange its roster hierarchically rather than alphabetically, or the fact that every single person who requests to join a group must be approved — but the site’s main limitations reside in the organizational realm.
The new CCC, however, is not blind to what students in this day and age really do need from it. Student groups’ CCC pages are now linked to their Facebook pages — a popular way for groups to publicize themselves and keep their current and prospective members updated.
Overall, the new CCC website will help increase student access to groups through some of its new features, but there are a few glitches — in particular, organizational ones — that must first be worked out of the new format before it can reach its full potential as the online crux of student groups.
