Thoughts about the new OSCAR website Forum

[floatie]

The new OSCAR page is finally up and running. What do you all think?

[Wild Card]

I'm using it on mobile and it's hideous.

The old design was a spreadsheet that neatly sorted out information for you.

This new design is just blocks of clutter. Disgraceful.

[Pennoyer v. Meh]

I'm not a fan at all. It's much harder to read and figure out. But whatever, it's not like I'm competitive anyway.

[InvisiblePineapple]

It's a little rough around the edges, e.g. a little harder to see whether you have active applications with judges, status of recommenders in a less obvious/organized place. But honestly I'll take it as a victory that I no longer have to make a few clicks to sort the postings by new.

[enoca]

First impression: 1 million times worse. "Old" version looked it, but it was very easy to sift through quickly. This new one echoes the horrible "modern" Symplicity interface my school uses for career stuff, which seems to be universally loathed and difficult to navigate.

Most obvious downgrade: what used to just be a well organized list of positions with sortable relevant columns is now a list of big blocks of information that individually take of much more of the screen and are only sortable from a list of filters up top. Basically, "position search," "documents," and "applications" are all much more cumbersome to sort through since you have to scroll just to see the same amount of information (and in a more confusing layout). And there are just plainly dumb things, like Niemeyer's listing at the top of the "new" postings doesn't even list which circuit he is on.

On the other hand, looks like you can finally upload transcripts instead of manually entering everything, so that's a big win.

The big "top 5 improvements" they are claiming are:

1) making the site more "friendly" for mobile users, which strikes me as a complete misunderstanding of the needs of the userbase.
2) logging in with your email address (who cares)
3) Tags instead of folders. I guess this is better, but it will not really effect how I use the site as an applicant. Hopefully, this is actually really helpful for some on the chambers side (but... I'm not optimistic).
4) Better (?) alerts and notifications. This doesn't matter to me but in theory it could help chambers be more responsive?
5) (a) A intra-site search bar so you can find webinars or whatever from anywhere (who cares)
5) (b) allegedly better filtering system for when you are searching. I am extremely skeptical this will be more user friendly based on using this same interface at my school, but the old one was also kind of wonky so who knows. One clear downgrade seems to be that (unless I am missing it) Judges no longer have a "page" where you can see all their existing positions.

Best case scenario, this at least makes the process better for chambers.

TL;DR: Likely downgrade for most applicants overall, with some specific improvements; hopefully some useful improvements for chambers.

[thepsychedelic]

nice that they have a list of newest positions posted though instead of like that weekly update page they used to do