Comment by andrewflnr
1 year ago
The registration website for my community college was like this. At certain times of night (and maybe weekend? not sure) it wouldn't let me register, and would instead put up a message that it was closed. I found this profoundly irritating. The website clearly worked fine, or I wouldn't be able to see the message. I understand if you can't support it outside of business hours, but at least let me try, maybe, and we'll cross the support bridge if we come to it? There's no good reason (i.e. not reeking of incompetence) for the website to actually break in the few weeks of registration, so it's most likely a moot point in practice. Is there a hamster running in a wheel who powers the server? Does he have a union? Just let me sign up for my classes, you assholes.
Ahem. Anyway. Institute "business hours" for your website at your own risk. Among your users you'll find it polarizing at best.
FWIW many institutions don't want a middle ground between a registration/request being received, and it being in limbo somewhere.
We could compare it to refusing mailed in registrations or not setting up a post box for out of office submissions, those are long lived practices depending on the office, and they "just" brought it wholesale to the online world.
If it's that much easier for the staff to hold a mental model of what they do and how they work, I'd respect their choice even if it feels so alien in the online side.
Please explain how this "limbo" happens if I do an online registration at 2am but doesn't happen if I do an online registration at 2pm.
There isn't a person walking through the system with me, making sure it worked right. I could understand an office that only accepts appointments or phone calls, but this is an online system that breaks that direct connection no matter what time of day you use it.
This is the same difference irl between:
- a post box you can leave your application
- a filing tray at the registration desk next to the clerk
For the later they have a real time handling of how much registration are coming in, and from who. They don't have to look at it realtime, but they have full control of the input and can either shut it down if needed, or immediately react to errors or issues.
It was a long time ago, but I once had a school clerk phone me right after I submitted a request, to tell me their system is dead and they want me physically come fill out the papers. For them it was a straight equivalent to the tray at their office, except it's digital.
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There's a mismatch with reality, because there really is a delay between a registration being received and someone starting to work on it.
This sounds like a beginner PM's plan for a task management system. Just make the status DONE or NOT_DONE, tasks are always done roughly instantly, stop adding complications with your intermediate states! Later this leads to bugs or at least poor UX because tasks don't finish instantly, and someone is convinced to add IN_PROGRESS. Eventually we add CANCELLED and FAILED and UP_FOR_RETRY and, if we're unlucky, a hundred more states. The benefit of those depends on the application but there's always a benefit in representing the three states instead of two.
There was no limbo state. When the website was working at all, it was fully automatic and told you immediately if your classes were registered or not.