By Ever since the new BeachBoard design came out, I’ve been keeping a shameful secret around the newsroom: I love the update. I like the brighter colors, the modern bubbly shapes of the classes and I love, and I do mean love, that little bell in the top right corner. I love that little guy and his little orange dot when I have new things to look at.
I know I’m in the minority here because I’ve heard mostly negatives about the new layout. But I’ve only been going to this school and using BeachBoard for three semesters and let me tell you, I hated the dark grey and yellow design the whole time I’ve been using it.
I’ve also never used Twitter night mode, so I know this is some predisposed preference of mine that most people disagree with.
I know that this in part is due to the fact that I only use BeachBoard on my laptop and desktop, so let me be fully transparent by saying that I have not and will never use the website on mobile just because I really haven’t had the need to and thus can’t speak on those specific issues.
When you log onto the website now, you’re greeted with a much simpler, more pleasant design with all of your classes in the top left corner and all of your announcements running down the middle of the page. You may have to pin your classes onto your homepage; you just click on “view all courses” and pin them. Real simple.
In fact, that seems to be the overarching theme of the entire update. Everything is much easier to look at, to access and figure out. And if you can’t find something, or just super lazy, there are some nice little videos showing you how to navigate the new design.
One small blemish on the beautiful face that is the new BeachBoard is that when you click on the orange dot for new updates, there are no different colors telling you which messages you’ve read and which you haven’t.
But this is minor in light of all the new and improved features. I’m always the first to complain when Snapchat and Twitter implements unnecessary updates onto us. I’m still recovering from the change from favoriting tweets to liking them, I don’t care how cute that colorful heart is.
BeachBoard is different because it was in desperate need of an update. The classlist layout, the comments available on the grades page and the upcoming assignments on the content page are all small but much needed improvements.
I was in class this week, coming off the high of this new BeachBoard layout when the person next to me said, “It’s so much easier to keep track of what I have to do now that the calendar is on the class homepage.” I didn’t even know that existed. It really is like the gift that keeps giving.
