The height of all ignorance
I literally got an attack of hives just now when I saw the peer comments for my group’s presentation for Search Engine Technologies.
Sort of gives me the impression that people are either writing rubbish for the sake of earning more participation points (apparently, students are given points for providing comments - which I found utterly ridiculous), or they just couldn’t be bothered listening to our presentation at all. The latter was the more likely reason, seeing how the eyes of half the class were practically glued to their laptop screens throughout the entire three hour class.
These two were the comments that stood out.
1) The interface doesn’t seems interesting enough for people to interact with it.
Because I was the one who designed the interface, it is inevitable for me to get a little miffed with this comment.
It’s a bloody search engine. Plus, the search context is in Law. What kind of ‘interesting’ interface do you expect it to have? If you’re hoping for the search engine to have images of Hello Kitty or any other damned cartoons plastered all over it’s interface, then you’re simply out of your mind.
Google has more or less demonstrated how a simple, minimalistic search interface helps improve usability, leading to it’s success as the world’s number 1 search engine. Interfaces need not be interesting for people to want to interact with it.
What’s key is it’s straightforwardness and understandability, which was my key focus when designing the interface. No point having an ‘interesting’ interface when people have to spend thirty seconds looking for the navigation bar or figuring out how to use the damned search function!
(Oh and incidentally, the number one complaint with existing law search engines is the complexity of it’s interface!)
2) The presentation was detailed but the Architecture was not shown.
My group members and myself did not spend two fucking hours coming up with the system architecture and formatting it nicely on the slides only to have someone mark us down in their peer comments/ratings just because they didn’t see it.
The architecture is shown distinctly on slide 17 - a techy looking diagram with 3D databases and system modules plus their interactions. It was the most outstanding slide in the whole presentation, and it formed the backbone of our search engine. And here, someone is telling us that he didn’t see it.
Simply shows us that someone wasn’t paying attention, no?
The rest of the comments - what can I say? Some of them comments were pretty good and I have taken note of them for inclusion in our project report. However, the other comments made my entire group want to shrivel up like a prune at their ignorance.
Quite evident that these people have no idea how existing Law search engines work, because several of them were pinpointing at things they shouldn’t be pinpointing.
For example, some idiot mentioned that users shouldn’t be forced to enter the citation just to access a particular case (which was one of the functions of our search engine on top of keyword search) - but have they ever realized that in real life, law students are simply dumped with case citations with no general background knowledge of the case at all?
There are Law Search Engines available on the SMU library resource portal and access is open to all students. Makes me wonder whether students even bother to derive some background information themselves before they make their comments.
BAH.
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Oh, and Lizzie dear had secretly brought me a curry puff and two spring rolls when I left the student lounge briefly this evening to grab some dinner …
… only to find that Irvin had eaten them all up when I returned. All I saw was an empty plate.
A million thanks anyway. It’s the thought that counts, aye?
well, some people just dun think hard enough! my piece of advise, listen to the ‘real’ comments and ignore those eye rolling ones. =)