Description
In this day and age when online programs are becoming more and more popular and fewer students are actually coming into the library itself, it is critical that an academic library’s website is an intuitive, user-friendly experience for its patrons. Moving from a text-heavy, librarian-centric website to an aesthetic, efficient, student focused one requires a great deal of data gathering through research, testing, and data analysis. We will discuss how we turned our website from being cluttered, illogical, and hard to navigate to being a modern, streamlined, and better organized by using usage monitoring software, user surveys, card sorting, affinity mapping, and usability testing. Some of the challenges we encountered during this project included library staff realization of who the website should be designed for, letting go of the “someday, someone, somewhere might need this” mentality, understanding the best practices for web design, and becoming aware that change can be a good thing.
Start Date
15-3-2017 1:00 PM
End Date
15-3-2017 2:00 PM
Library Website Redesign: Turning Awful into Awesome
In this day and age when online programs are becoming more and more popular and fewer students are actually coming into the library itself, it is critical that an academic library’s website is an intuitive, user-friendly experience for its patrons. Moving from a text-heavy, librarian-centric website to an aesthetic, efficient, student focused one requires a great deal of data gathering through research, testing, and data analysis. We will discuss how we turned our website from being cluttered, illogical, and hard to navigate to being a modern, streamlined, and better organized by using usage monitoring software, user surveys, card sorting, affinity mapping, and usability testing. Some of the challenges we encountered during this project included library staff realization of who the website should be designed for, letting go of the “someday, someone, somewhere might need this” mentality, understanding the best practices for web design, and becoming aware that change can be a good thing.