DSG working with SISS Office to redesign ACES

<p>President-elect Tara Bansal, second from right, and the DSG Academic Affairs Committee are hoping to see more student-friendly resources on ACES.</p>

President-elect Tara Bansal, second from right, and the DSG Academic Affairs Committee are hoping to see more student-friendly resources on ACES.

Following student complaints about the ACES interface, the website is being redesigned to be more user-friendly.

The Student Information Services and Systems Office is working with Duke Student Government on an ACES redesign project. The redesign aims to allow more fluid navigation of the site as well as provide a more modern look, said Kathy Bader, assistant vice provost and director of SISS.

“The initiative to redesign ACES came from my office, beginning several years ago in response to student observations that the look and feel were outdated and the navigation clumsy,” Bader said. “There were also design pressures given the multiple roles a user may have in the system.”

The redesigned ACES is expected to have more resources and be easier to navigate. SISS began working with DSG last year to get organized feedback from volunteers who are testing the new site. Freshman Sean Bissell, DSG senator for academic affairs, created a focus group open to all students to get more feedback on the redesign.

DSG president-elect Tara Bansal, a junior, explained that the first part of the project is dedicated to adding more course details and making class synopses more accessible.

As for the second part of the project, three main modules—including class resource archives, student comments and course videos—are going to be integrated into ACES.

“I would love to see students be able to read other students’ comments on classes and get a better idea of the quality of the class and what the class is like,” Bansal said.

In addition to student comments, course videos will feature professors explaining the contents of the classes they teach.

“Classes currently have an unhelpful description on ACES that makes it difficult for students to see what the structure of the class is like, how it’s taught, what sort of assignments are in store and how to decide between a class with two sections taught,” said freshman Kushal Kadakia, DSG senator for academic affairs.

Many students have complained about the difficulty of navigating the current ACES website.

“ACES is really slow and is especially hard for people to start on. It took me a long time to get to know how to use it when I registered the classes for the first time last summer,” said freshman Kaijie Chen. “It’s really hard to find specific classes and the information there is little. All it has now is a paragraph of synopsis. It would definitely help to have more course descriptions on ACES.”

The whole ACES redesign process will take several years and be rolled out in stages, Bader noted. So far, the basic ACES student interface redesign is planned to be launched this summer. They will lay the groundwork for the three new models this spring and summer.

Bansal said she hopes that the three new modules would be unveiled next Fall with faculty approval.

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