Think about the last time you went to visit your great aunt Mildred. Yeah, the one who lives three hours away up the interstate. Living in a mid-century modern, one-story with a carport lined with shelves, a den enclosed by rough oak paneling, and green shag carpets. 

Now picture that this year, the holidays are being held at your Aunt Catherine’s in the city’s freshly-gentrified northern area. The walls are stripped bare — she’s a minimalist, she says — drawing your attention to the miles of new glass, spotless interiors, and the silence of neighbors who have yet to move in.  

A distinct lack of culture, spirit, and the inexplicable feeling of history wherever you move. 

This is the dawn of a new era, marking the crucial distinction between WebSTAC, dearly beloved by WashU alums stretching as far back as the 80s, and the new Workday platform. It’s a distinction as vast as the difference between the fresh LEED Platinum Certified interiors of Hillman Hall and the storied ancient stones of Busch Hall (campus’s oldest building, dating back to the 1904 World’s Fair). Workday is a startling reality that students and faculty alike are grappling with, echoing complaints of why it takes five separate clicks to navigate from the main page to the course listings page. 

With any bold vision comes certain costs. Technical difficulties are to be expected; after all, the dry-run of a performance is never the Tony Award-winning spectacle worth being written over. It naturally takes time to settle into the future, and so the heart of the Workday issue is not one relating to server crashes, timeouts, or a combination of the two, resulting in a crashout. 

The heart of the matter is Workday’s lack thereof. Workday is visually unappealing, aesthetically distressing, and emotionally offensive. All while being caught in the borderlands of a mixed-use platform many of us are familiar with only in the context of punching in or out of on-campus employment, now doused with a clean coat of Lowe’s finest acrylic into a software for educational use. 

Signing into the app, I’m confronted with a rush of information, and presented with more options than a choose-your-own-adventure book. Blinking away my surprise, I search up ‘Course Listings’ to regain my bearings. This is what I find:

“Okay,” I say. 18 articles having at least some tenuous connection to the topic of interest. One of them has to work. Naturally, I pick the first. 

I’m led to a 13-step process of completing my planned schedule for the next semester. Five steps later and I have finally found course listings. After another seven steps, I should have my schedule for the next semester. Now I’m no expert, but a process once taking max three steps now taking 13 is absurd.

Still with me? Let’s try an HGTV approach to this and look at the house before the renovations. On WebSTAC, scrawled in white letterings framed by a scarlet red banner at the top of the screen, I see ‘Courses’ written clearly. A second later, the future of my academic career at WashU unfurls itself with the ease and glide of a well-oiled door hinge. I see my major programs under ‘Global Studies’ displayed proudly on my screen. I breathe a sigh of sheer relief. 

Tell me why there are four separate options for ‘Global Studies’ in Workday? And why none of them, when prompted, actually show me classes pertaining to that major? 

The most egregious flaw might be the death of cross-listing. The beauty of brick and mortar is the simple pleasure of window shopping along the brightly illuminated promenades of the neighborhood mall. Without it, I might never know that a class shelved under Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences might count for my major, giving me a whole new perspective and independence while deciding my education. 

But these are not gripes with functional issues. The lights work, the plumbing is fine, and the taps run with efficiency. But the layout makes no sense. The house’s only bathroom is in the basement, while the bedrooms are on the second floor. Workday is a visual nightmare. A dystopian interpretation of modernity and a paradox of efficiency, where a process easily understood under the guidance of WebSTAC is twisted beyond recognition under the heavy-handed rule of Workday.

I believe strongly in the phrase, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We can all agree WebSTAC looked dated, and made many of us think of it as a relic from semesters past and present, certainly not future. It showed its age with a sense of pride, and that I can respect. But any Communication Design major will tell you, the critical importance of a user-friendly interface is paramount. And when I think of user-friendly, I think of something I consider visually inviting. Waiting at the door for me with a plate of cookies and a kind word. Not a handbook and confusingly-drawn map. 

This is not a hate letter to Workday. I may be accused of letting nostalgia pollute my memories of WebSTAC, and of holding onto the past with too-iron of a grip the way great aunt Mildred fought every single member of the family about moving the holiday celebration to aunt Catherine’s. The staggered registration times benefitting the lucky-few drawn for the earliest slots, the random errors, buggy glitches, and proverbial shag carpeting of its ancient layout should not leave too much to long for.

Instead, this is a letter of hope. I am all for minimalism, and art is a subjective experience I would not dare argue. However, when I am left with no alternative to log off Workday in defeat and hope that tomorrow brings some update, the interface is at the center of that journey. I am disincentivized from learning the ropes of Workday, and I quit the same way I do whenever I look at a homework problem I know is going to remain unsolved until the professor addresses it in class. Or until I watch a Khan Academy tutorial.

Workday is the future. This is a fact, and one we’ll all accept in time. I’m sure a few semesters down the line, we’ll laugh about how complicated it was at first. Once we cross the Himalayas, and undergo the first registration with Workday, we’ll have the luxury of time to figure out the future together. 

I’m sure holidays at aunt Catherine’s will feel like the new normal a few years down the line, too. But only once we spruce the place up a bit! Make a new stain on the couch, place some photos and art on the walls, color the empty space with the memories of a career-ending family Monopoly night. 

My point is, Workday facilitators must make the welcome screen easier to understand. Only a click away should be the course listings. And by no means were all the changes bad; for example, I think the option of creating multiple schedules is a great innovation from the horrific scenes like this:

I’m no software engineer, computer engineer, or engineer period, but we do have a wealth of those here. We also have a wealth of Sam Fox students who would love to get their hands dirty with the prospect of redesigning Workday for the benefit of students. How feasible this is, I’m not qualified to answer. But, it’s a thought worth considering. 

And maybe for old time’s sake, we can drive up the interstate again, and have New Year’s at aunt Mildred’s. Why not?