Opinion Board | Out of focus

If you have a maintenance request, you better hope it's an emergency. That way you can call Facilities Services directly. Either that or be prepared to lie and say it is, because there's no way you're going to figure out how to use FacilityFocus, Penn's new Web site for service requests.

We're having a hard time understanding how FacilityFocus could possibly be "new." More likely, we suspect, the site was designed in 1994 and is only now being unleashed on the helpless Penn community for reasons which only Facilities can comprehend.

FacilityFocus is atrociously ugly, which is something we've come to expect from Penn's Web sites. Aesthetically, the only redeeming feature of the site is the text in the upper-right-hand corner greeting the user with a "Hello" followed by his PennCard number.

Such shortcomings would be acceptable if FacilityFocus was at least straightforward to use. Unfortunately it puts even PennPortal to shame in its lack of intuitiveness. Log onto the site and you're immediately confronted with a page demanding a decision you're ill-equipped to make: Customer request or work request? We're still not sure.

After figuring that out, you're brought to a page asking for your budget, customer-request number, serial number and region (among other information you have no clue how to answer). As it turns out, this page is actually intended for searching for past requests, despite the fact that the site gives no indication that this is the case. Apparently, if you're making a request, you're meant to click a tab oddly-titled "Insert."

Inexplicably, there is no "Help" tab. Or perhaps there is and it's titled "Cancel," - we didn't try that, but admittedly it's a possibility.

Penn students need user's manuals to navigate the site successfully.

Literally.

Facilities distributed them at the beginning of the year in student mailboxes.

We hope you kept it.

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