evidence-based redesign of an academic library homepage
TRANSCRIPT
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Jennie Woodfield [email protected]
CONTEXTMassey University is a multi-campus higher education provider offering a broad range of undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications, alongside a strong research background. Massey has the largest distance education offer of all New Zealand Universities with over 14,000 students enrolled in Distance study. The website had undergone several “major" overhauls over the years and was due for a refresh.
CHALLENGESExperience and the UX literature i, ii, iii shows:• Librarians are accustomed to telling users what they
think they need to know.• We make assumptions all the time about what users
need and how they behave.• We like to give users every possible bit of information
we can – just in case they might need it.User testing challenged our thinking about how things
should be – we had to make a decision whether to go with our beliefs or go with the users and
that was difficult for some!
The homepage is not designed for teaching librarians, but for our users – this is proving challenging for some staff.What we see in library teaching sessions is not evidence of user behaviour in reality. Do we design for what we’d like users to do or what they actually do?We need to be more iterative in our work, making things better is the priority rather than timing changes around teaching loads – need to find a balance between user need and staff impact.
SURPRISES• Getting the purpose and primary audience for our
homepage clear was important and we constantly needed to remind ourselves of these. It was a surprise that the project team could not agree on the target audience
• Even if users say they will follow a certain pattern of behaviour, what they will actually do is different.
• The traditional F shape for homepage visibility wasn't borne out in our testing.
• What we think is critical information may not be critical for the user We needed to balance this with a bit of common sense but were heavily influenced by the user evidence.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN AND SCOPE
Establish audience, purpose, scope.
Literature review.
Evaluate other website home pages.
USER EVIDENCE
Usage statistics.
User feedback form.
User card sort and questions / answers.
Every single link under the sun
seems to be on there. It's really
quite cluttered and challenging!
EVIDENCE-BASED REDESIGN OF AN ACADEMIC LIBRARY HOME PAGEWoodfield, Jennie1 and Lamond, Heather2 | 1 Web Librarian, Massey University Library, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. 2 Associate University Librarian (Client Services), Massey University Library, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
BUILD AND ITERATE
DESIGN PRINCIPLES:• Minimise scrolling• De-clutter• Imagery identifiably
New Zealand, (not books)• Allow for mobile use.
Several different designs – one chosen.
Technical aspects and limitations.
MARKET AND GO-LIVE
Sneak preview and feedback
Go live!
USER TESTING
Scenario / task-based.
Think aloud protocol.
All student levels and modes; academic staff.
ITERATE
Iterations based on user testing results.
Implications and re-design for other site pages that
are accessible from the home page.
i Schmidt, Aaron; Etches, Amanda (2012). User Experience (UX) Design for Libraries: (THE TECH SET® #18). Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com ii Krug, S 2006, Don't make me think!: a common sense approach to Web usability, New Riders, Berkeley, CA.iii Reidsma, M 2012, ‘Bad library websites are a symptom’, Matthew Reidsma, web log post, 19 March, retrieved from http://matthew.reidsrow.com/articles/15
ONGOING MONITORING
AND EVALUATION
Feedback gathered and analysed.
It seems all jumbled and I feel confused looking at it.
I did click around on the
new homepage and I have to say that to me it seems a great
improvement in terms of ease
of use.
Anyone else confused by the
new library layout? I can’t even figure out how to search topics
regarding journal articles.
Love the banner and the page has
lots of white space and easy to find
things on the page