<p>This is SERIOUSLY the most non-userfriendly, horrible, piece of junk system I have ever come across. I am going to srtart a petition to get rid of it. My previous school had a 400x better system.</p>
<p>Does anyone else agree?</p>
<p>Unofficially? Yes.</p>
<p>Officially? It just kinda takes some getting used to. Once you've worked your way through it for a few weeks, you'll understand its quirks and its tendency to be a royal pain. I don't use it the same way a student would, though, so I'll wait for some other folks to respond also.</p>
<p>-Chris</p>
<p>I'm quite happy that this subject was raised. I spent a number of years as a software developer designing, interestingly enough, web-based applications.</p>
<p>When I returned to Stony Brook full-time to finish an undergraduate degree and then for my PhD, and I was shocked at how poorly designed Solar really is. Without exaggeration, it's really, truly terrible. I'm being very serious when I say that I can (and have) design and build a better application over a weekend.</p>
<p>If I were to redesign Solar 2.0, I would scrap most of the existing code and rebuild the entire thing from the ground up with - at the bare minimum - the following quality of life changes:</p>
<p>1 - The look and feel of most of the interface is essentially a monolithic block of teeny-tiny text. Seriously, what font is that, Flyspeck 3? A huge improvement would be to utilize hypertext inherent ability to support multiple layers of information, rather the just dumping it all on one page. Simply put: menus good, tiny text bad. That goes for the main page, the search results, and everything in between.</p>
<p>2 - The primary use of Solar for students is to manage their class enrollment. I would like to see what is now FIVE options under the "Enrollment" section streamlined and integrated into a single function. Exactly how I would do that is beyond the scope of this post, but it's not difficult.</p>
<p>3 - Each and every selection (most notably in the "Class Search" function, but in other places as well), causes an unnecessary page reload. Not only does the frustrate the student/user, but necessitates that what should be one server request becomes several, greatly increasing the demands on the server and slowing the server's response time. With each page reload during peak times of 15 or 20 seconds during heavy traffic times it can seemingly forever just to get past the five page loads required just to GET TO THE SEARCH. A lesson in patience indeed.</p>
<p>4 - I have a special disdain for the "class search" feature. As possibly the most-used function of Solar, it should be the most streamlined. Unfortunately, especially when you're searching for multiple classes, it's really, really poor. With so many reasons why this thing is so awful, I find myself forced to restrict myself to the most blatant (as I see them, and in no particular order):</p>
<p>4a - There is no cap on the size of the results returned. I've actually accidentally crashed the server several times by requesting, say, all BIO sections. </p>
<p>4b - The catalog text field and its associated "exact match" vs "wild card" is clunky and unreliable. The "Department", "Subject", "Catalog Number", "Course ID", and "Class Number" fields can be easily rolled into three drop-down fields with no loss of functionality.</p>
<p>4c - It's buggy. Is you perform one search that fails to find results, you have to start the search process all over, because ALL subsequent searches from that page will also return no results, no matter what.</p>
<p>I've got a thousand more points, but in short, Solar is severely buggy, awkward, and inefficient, and I welcome the day when it's replaced by something at least marginally better.</p>
<p>Clockwork Soul - I am glad that someone else feels the same way I do.</p>
<p>While I agree with all of your points, I am not skilled in web design and code.</p>
<p>The thing that annoys me most with this application is the amount of times the pages have to reload and refresh after every single selection. Class Term, Campus Location should all be presets, you shouldn't have to select Fall 2007, and WEST for each friggin' time, it seriously gets annoying. Click the 'back' button and you asked for too much.</p>
<p>When you want a class and it tells you a CLASS NUMBER instead of WHAT class it is that conflicts with the class you want, it's just ridiculous. I am not a machine that runs on code, I am a PERSON.</p>
<p>Additionally, the "Processing" is ridiculous, the aesthetic website design is horrid, and it's time consuming. The difference between the SBU main webpage and Solar is startling. It's as if Stony Brook doesn't care about their students, they want you to get lured in by their superficial glamour, then tortured with their inner incompentency.</p>
<p>In short, Stony Brook, get your act together and get rid of your "system".</p>
<p>I feel the same way. Stony's email service is exactly like Solar. Some of the interphases load while others do not. I mean it is, in theory, supposed to be easy to use, but it loads very slowly and has a very minute amount of features. Stony should pay clockworksoul to rebuild it. Honestly, it is terrible.</p>
<p>The email service is commercially purchased, but it isn't exactly a model of efficiency itself, so it's probably running on outdated hardware. </p>
<p>Solar, however, is home brewed. I haven't looked into it, but it was probably built either by a lowest-bid contractor or by somebody in-house who was thrown the project and given not nearly enough time to do it well. Heck, if they just gave me a couple hundred bucks, and I'd be happy to rebuild it. Even lunch and a sincere thank you might do, given how much good a new system would do. All I would need is two weeks and a dummy database (same database design, but without real data).</p>
<p>I think the reason they don't want to fix it now is because it works (poorly), and they're afraid that something else will come along and break the whole system, making them look even worse than if they just kept Solar in the first place.</p>
<p>Yeah, if we could get enough complaints we could get it revamped. It would definetly benefit the entire university.</p>