Creative differences, Pt. 1

I’m taking a massive open online course (MOOC) from Stanford University’s d.school. (Look, that’s what they call themselves; I wouldn’t make that up, much less foist it onto anyone else.) It’s called “A Crash Course in Creativity.” I think there are several thousand people all over the world taking the course, which consists of video lectures and then weekly assignments.

So far we’ve had two individual assignments—post a “book cover” and 200-word autobiography, and post a mind map and narrative for an exercise in observation. I’ll post separately about the latter; you don’t need to know anything about the former.

But let me just say this: I do not get why the user experience (UX) for this course sucks so badly. Stanford is supposed to be at the cutting edge of technology—it gave us Google and recombinant DNA, for crying out loud. Why, then, does every page on the course site take about 15 seconds to load? And why do they have an archaic online editing tool? And what’s up with not being able to archive messages?

In short—why does the whole web application look like it was designed and built in 1998?

Could this be part of the “creative” challenge?