‘Coming soon’ no more: myUofC mobile experience finally launches
By Jason Herring, March 15 2019 —
The ‘myUofC mobile experience’ has been a longstanding joke among University of Calgary students, prodding fun at the message that popped up when they tried to access their student centre through their phones. With the U of C performing an overhaul over the weekend of March 9, that experience is now a reality.
The student centre redesign applies to both desktop and mobile browsers. It features a more sleek design that removes clutter from the frontpage, including only a rotating ‘announcements’ block and lists of courses in current and upcoming semesters.
Many of the site’s other functionalities, like viewing financials or finding grades or exam scheduling, can be accessed through the site’s drop-down menus.
U of C registrar Angelique Saweczko says she’s pleased with the website’s launch.
“We did what we call a ‘silent launch’ on Saturday to make sure that everything was working okay, to test it, and it went really smoothly,” Saweczko said. “There’s always a few things behind the scenes that we tweak and fix as we go through but nothing that would actually impact students and what they see.”
The website was originally slated for a mid-February launch, but had to be pushed back in part due to Calgary’s frigid weather, according to Saweczko.
“There were some system performance challenges in February. With the cold weather, there was some issues on the infrastructure side, so because of that, we thought it would be best to delay because we didn’t want to launch a tool and have something else potentially have an impact on the experience students were going to have,” she said. “We thought, ‘We’ll just push it a couple weeks to the next window,’ because we wanted to make sure it was aligned with when registration would be starting.”
What’s the U of C most proud of about the site’s launch?
“The fact that it’s now a mobile-friendly site that adapts to the device that students are using,” Saweczko said. “[For] the launch itself, I’m most proud of the team. The team did an excellent job of making a tool that most focused on students.”
Students on social media seemed to appreciate the site’s launch.
“I can’t believe I’m still alive when the myUofC Mobile Experience finally arrived,” tweeted @sirdwaigne.