Experimetrix Suckage

Experimetrix is a website used by UCSD's Psychology Department to schedule subjects for experiments. It provides a great service; however, it is very poorly designed from both the subjects' and experimenters' end.

I doubt the designers of Experimetrix performed much (or any) user testing because parts of the design actually encourage people to make mistakes. For instance, I 199 in Psychology Professor Hal Pashler's lab running experiments. When creating new experiment appointments on Experimetrix, they provide a system of drop-down menus to specify the time of the appointment. The experimenter must select the hour, minute and either 'a.m.' or 'p.m.' in separate menus. The problem is that people tend to forget to set the 'a.m./p.m.' correctly. It is also hard to conceptualize the time when the appointments you made are at because they display this data in plain text rather than using a visual system. Experimetrix would benefit from using a calendar metaphor.

This is just one example of the system's ill-conceived UI. Even if I don't end up using this idea for the project I'd like to redesign the Experimetrix UI. I've been itching to do this for some time now because it's a pain to use.