There’s a new step I’ve added to my morning routine. It’s outrageously efficient, deeply cathartic and fills me with enough wild exasperation that I jump out of bed wide awake, ready to tackle the disappointments of yet another day.
It’s called “deleting the GatorHub email.”
In a single fluid motion that happens before I can even process being conscious, I reach for my phone, open Gmail, rip past the emails I actually need to reply to and blast GatorHub straight into the trash with all the power and precision of a Serena Williams serve. I don’t even open the message.
GatorHub’s recent venture into my email inbox represents a kind of absurd ouroboros: an app first trotted out as the replacement for MyAllegheny — a daily email digest of on-campus happenings — reinvents itself anew, as a daily email digest of on-campus happenings. Except this time, an entire notification is wasted on just one teeny morsel of information, ostensibly as a kind of bait that’s supposed to lure me into checking the app. “Every weekday,” the first GatorHub daily email explained, “an announcement will be randomly selected and emailed to the campus community to offer a glimpse into GatorHub announcement activity.”
This email is in addition to the five to ten push notifications sent to everyone’s phones at 6:00 a.m. every day if they have the app downloaded.
In the days of yore, everyone in the Allegheny email system received a single MyAllegheny notification. It was only as long as it needed to be, and it was rich with information. Limited to just over a hundred words, anyone submitting their event or news for inclusion in MyAllegheny was pressed to cut filler and write with the succinct word-economy of a telegram. We got dates, times, locations and deadlines in the first or second sentence. Links allowed users to retrieve more information only if they were interested in delving deeper. With the MyAllegheny system, I was treated like an adult in charge of deciding my own fate — I was given a tool that allowed me to learn what was going on around campus, and I used it.
Like a tragic Shakespearean hero, MyAllegheny’s defining strength was also the weakness that led to its downfall: it was boring. It was a simple, straightforward concept that, based on Information Technology staff member’s statements last year about how its successor was designed to mimic an “Instagram-like death scroll,” we probably took for granted. Instead, we conflated “attention-grabbing” with “useful,” and now GatorHub plays notification roulette with both my phone and my computer.
It’s overwhelming. Posts on GatorHub include images, PDFs, emojis and Canva flyers all clamoring for my attention, making it difficult to zero in on the information that matters. I appreciate that the platform has consolidated so many links and resources into one place, but the widgets make the app feel like an endless network of pages.
I’d already been checking GatorHub more than once a day prior to the daily emails, and I don’t think that this is a cause for celebration. At first glance, it seems like more time spent on GatorHub should equate to higher-quality student engagement. But the reality is that I’m checking GatorHub more frequently than I actually should have to because of how difficult it is to find and share information on the app. Its search feature is nowhere near as reliable as Gmail’s system of filters for keywords, senders and dates, meaning that I have to sift through an avalanche of long posts, emojis and visual attachments just to figure out the location of that event I vaguely remember seeing four days ago. When all other modes of interpersonal collaboration and personal organization take place on Allegheny’s Google Suite, it becomes onerous to switch tabs back and forth between GatorHub, my calendar and my email just to confirm my availability for an event.
GatorHub’s “Recent Portal Activity” is structured like early Instagram’s chronological rolling feed, so while there are only a handful of new announcements posted each day, it never truly feels like I’m fully caught up on everything happening around campus. I used to be able to reach the end of an email, mark it as read and move on with my day, but on GatorHub, there’s no satisfying indication that I’ve completed the task of staying updated. As I’ve learned in my communications classes at Allegheny, user interfaces like this weren’t designed to make information interesting or memorable; they’re designed to keep you online as long as possible. And that’s exactly what happens. Is it really so surprising that GatorHub keeps me staring at my phone instead of roaming campus in search of an event (like I used to) when there’s no embedded cue that it’s time to rejoin the physical world?
Most often, I quiet the uneasy sense that I could be missing something by poking around parts of the platform I don’t actually need to monitor, like the countdown to my graduation (yipe!!) or the TimelyCare FAQ that hasn’t been updated since we started using that service. And then I still feel unsure about whether I’m missing out, so I check Instagram, and then LinkedIn. I want to spend less time on my phone and more time engaging meaningfully with my college community, but nearly every time I’ve checked GatorHub, I’ve looked up half an hour later and realized I’m actually missing out on real experiences with my friends who’re just in the other room.
It’s been a year. If GatorHub is reinventing the wheel, maybe the original wheel wasn’t so bad after all.
