You all know Sulis right?
The site that allows lectures to post module resources and assignments?
The magical place where students can login and get everything they need for their treasured revision.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
Well I’m here to tell you that Sulis can be a pain in the derrière (pardon my French).
The main reasons I have a bone to pick with Sulis are that:
- It’s not very straight-forward.
- Universal backspace law is not adhered to.
When you first log into Sulis it’s not very clear where to begin. You are presented with the bones of a webpage and some links on the left hand side such as: “My Communications”, “My Tools” & “My Settings”. These links aren’t very useful unless you are in the specific module page you want to grab the resources for. If you are on the home page then these links offer little more than bare text fields or error messages.
The idea of getting link to the module’s page isn’t the clearest for a user and can lead to some foul choice of words towards the site.
A real pet hate of mine is when things don’t follow the guidelines that everything else in the world are using. For example, if you press the “tab” key, text will space forward a set amount of spaces (usually 4) and if you press “shift” + “tab”, the text will space backwards that amount. This is an easy concept to grasp and is widely used.
Another example is when you hit the “backspace” key the webpage should have some sort of “breadcrumb” system that causes it to step back up the ladder and move back to the previous page.
Sulis doesn’t do this, and it’s very irritating. If you, as a user, select a folder in the Resources to section and traverse into it a few levels, you’d expect the backspace key to take you back up one level. Unfortunately it takes you back to the previous section you were on e.g. “Syllabus”.
In conclusion, I don’t believe Sulis is the application to use for your college career. It causes more stress than it’s worth most of the time and makes for an unhappy class.
Nobody wants that now do they?
Stay Sassy Subscribers! 🙂
Diary Of A Programmer 