Bad Williams Design

Twice a year, every on-campus student at Williams college will inevitably go to the catalog as they try to figure out what exactly they will be doing with their lives. Recently, the catalog interface was updated from this:

to this:

While the new design definitely is more aesthetically pleasing, what with its full-color pictures and fancy scroll-down categories, it is by far a much worse design. The old catalog immediately showed every department at Williams and associated links to offered classes for that academic year. The new catalog imposes a new artifically constructed divisional separation and hides so much crucial information. There is now no way for you to see all of Williams’ departments at once; instead, you have to click on one of the three categories before you can see the departments, and even when you do click, the margins between each link is so huge that they don’t even fit on one page anymore, as shown below:

Even worse, only one of these divisional category tabs can be open at once, further emphasizing the sense of exclusivity between each division. If you refresh the page, all the tabs are closed again, so if you wanted to explore your 32 and look outside the division you’re majoring in, you have to click every. single. time. you want to take a look at the departments in a particular division. The new design has taken the functionality of all links fitting on a single page, ready to be looked at with a single glance, and broken it apart into these three cumbersome drop-down categories.

The new catalog only goes to show that aesthetics is not enough: if a redesign takes old functionality and eschews it for appearances, then the redesign is an unsuccessful one. In this case, not only is the new design unweildy and inefficient, the three exclusive divisional tabs also signifies and solidifies to students looking for new classes the feeling of exclusivity between the three Williams divisions of departments.