OneStart 2.0 scheduled to be released in the fall

Imagine cramming nearly every service the University provides into a single office in a single building.\nAcademic records, class schedules and bursar information for 100,000 students. Course registration and scheduling for 1.1 million credit hours’ worth of classes each semester. Financial management and human resources records for 19,000 employees spread across eight campuses throughout the state. Now imagine that the people who walk in the door see only the services pertinent to them, depending on whether they are undergraduate or graduate students or faculty or staff members.\nThose are the challenges Brian McGough’s team of developers are facing as they redesign the OneStart portal, the Web site interface for many of the services that every student, faculty and staff member at IU use on a regular basis. These services provide easy access for class scheduling, bursar payments, and grade information, among many other tools. \nOneStart 2.0, which is scheduled to roll out Sept. 29, features streamlined and simplified navigation and a cleaner, less cluttered design.\nIn redesigning OneStart, University Information Technology Services hopes to increase the site’s usability and make the services and utilities that students and employees rely on easier to find, McGough, a development team leader, said. \n“It gives you a lot more intuitive way of navigating,” he said.\nOne of the biggest new additions to OneStart is the capability to accept active content from various departments across the University, McGough said. When it goes live, OneStart 2.0 will feature a list of the most clicked-on services students, faculty and staff members are using. This means that during class registration, for example, the “add classes” link will be prominently displayed, but during the rest of the semester, when it isn’t needed, other services will take center stage, he said.\nMcGough also hopes other services will eventually add their own active content. IU Libraries could add a utility that tells students which books they have checked out and their due dates every time they log in to OneStart, or the Bursar department could build and easily install a live-updated report on how much users owe on their bursar bills, he said.\nBut the most obvious change that students will notice this fall is site navigation. The preliminary design features five color-coded tabs, each giving users access to a different set of services and links.\n“All this is aimed at getting people to the services they need,” McGough said.\nA standard set of notifications will pop up to help users find their way around the site, he said.\nThe 11-month development of OneStart 2.0 came after responses to a UITS usability study of the original OneStart suggested that it was cluttered and sometimes difficult to use. Regular satisfaction surveys and user comments also indicated that many students and employees wanted changes made to the Web portal, McGough said.\nSince UITS is just updating the OneStart portal and not tinkering with PeopleSoft, the student information systems program that actually manages student and employee records and services, the updates are relatively minor, he said.\nWhen IU rolled out PeopleSoft and OneStart in the fall of 2004, the University lost $6.6 million in tuition because of a glitch that prevented financial aid letters from being sent. Other glitches with registration and class schedules frustrated students.\nOne of the lessons the University learned from that fiasco is that it is now making updates gradually. UITS hopes to have OneStart 2.0 off the ground and running this fall in time to make a smooth transition to the new version of PeopleSoft that is due out in February, McGough said.