Despite the general lack of community-building college activities at NYU like big sports, being in everyone’s business, and going to the same frat house to party every weekend, we do have some things in common. We all love the Hayden lady. We all love cheap food ($1 slices, falafel, chicken over rice). And we all hate NYUHome.

Earlier this week, I got particularly fed up when Albert told me for the third time that my elapsed login time (11 minutes) exceeded the maximum allowed (10 minutes). So I sent a laundry list of complaints to ITS, filled with snark about how NYUHome mirrors NYU’s bureaucracy in a digital format.

To my surprise, I got a professional, useful response two days later. Here are some of the insights.

I really only use two things on NYUHome: Blackboard and Albert. Having to click through the Academics tab to get to them is a source of great irritation. (Small things on the Web make a huge difference in ease of use).

But check this out: You can put Blackboard and Albert on the front page. From ITS’ Priya Ollapally (give her a raise!):

The Home tab is customizable… If you click “Channels” on the upper-right hand corner of the screen, you can choose what channels should appear in your Home tab. Some can’t be removed, but any can be added.

You can also rearrange channels tabs so that the channels you want to access most are at the top. By clicking the [+] in the upper-right corner of each channel [on the front page], you’ll expand a menu of icons; to move a channel up, click the up arrow. It’s a little tedious, and we’ve been hoping to make channels click-and-draggable, but enhancements like those often get put on the back burner when more urgent issues arise.

I was embarrassed that I hadn’t figured this out before (I never tried channels, only preferences), especially since the fix is so simple.

You should also know by now that NYU’s email system is horrible. Here’s more advice:

Regarding email: we’re exploring ways to make it better, but services that affect our community of thousands can take some time to improve. In the mean time, I’d suggest using Apple Mail or Thunderbird, since the web interface is understandably clunky. Instructions are here.

Not bad options, but I would recommend forwarding to your Gmail account (you have one, right?). NYU Local already covered exactly how to do that here.

Finally, it turns out that Albert isn’t managed by ITS. (This is certainly part of the problem, NYU. Consolidate, please.) I will list them here in the hopes that someone who manages Albert will see them. 

• Make a login available on the “exceeded 10 minutes” screen so that we don’t have to log out and back in. So annoying.
• Eliminate extraneous pages. There are way too many times when we have to go through a preliminary page with a “submit” button before we get where we want to be.
• As a corollary to the previous point, allow us to set our preferences. I am always looking for “all undergraduate courses,” not law courses. Don’t make us select that every time.

Please, leave your grievances in the comments. But remember that Priya feels our pain:

I totally understand that there are a lot of systems in place at ITS that can be greatly improved — it’s a frustration for us employees as well, but we are definitely working on it all the time with the limited staff we’ve got.