cc licensed flickr photo shared by ntr23
so at least two of us in the collective have recently gone live with new library websites (probably more, ’tis the time of year). as i was dealing with the fallout from this (and yes, i know, there will always be fallout – some of da peeples will never be happy, not never) i started wondering about the whole process of redesigning library websites.
what are we trying to accomplish with these redesigns? the answer is usually “to make things easier to find for our users”. but this is where it gets all kinds of sticky. libraries have _so_many_ different user groups. in my own library we have:
- undergraduates
- graduate students
- researchers
- professors
- librarians (both chez nous and at other institutions)
- continuing education students
- students who speak neither English nor French
- citizens of the city & province
- and, oh ya, ANYONE WHO FINDS US THROUGH THE GOOGLEMACHINE!
what does this mean for library site design?
how many groups do we need to consult prior to making a big change?
do we then weight the opinions of certain groups more than others?
when doing the redesign, should we do it in-house, or outsource it to a company that can make it sleeker than your average web services librarian has time for?
should we be designing for the 800×600 IE6 group of folks out there, or should we use the redesign of the library site to teach them that the minimum standards have changed, and they should join us, the friendly library, in this new (upgraded) online world?
where’s the line between accessibility and ease of use? is there one? is it possible to have a site that meets accessibility standards, is mobile-ready, and isn’t nine kinds of fug?
so, who wants to take a stab at answering some of these questions?
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Ahhh you are so brave!
We addressed the audience thing head on, and of course there are waves of reaction to that choice. Our primary audience is undergraduate students at our campus. And of them, we are trying to answer the questions 80% of them have. This means that some of the quirkier things are harder to find, and it means that faculty questions are not answered on the first page. (They have to click the “faculty” tab, makng them secondarily our audience.) We have only been live a couple of weeks and I’m already really feeling the need for multiple views for our different audiences.
Our approach to that will be to create a website you have to log into. I know that will go over like a lead balloon, but if we had everyone logging in, we could deliver content to them based on their role and their current needs. That way we could properly address the needs of all our users.
We define our primary user group as the faculty and students on campus: people who are using the library for research or instruction. We held focus groups with faculty, grad students, and undergrads during our last go-round.
When it came to deciding on the visual design parameters, we went for 1024-wide for the simple reason that that’s how most of the web is working anyway. If you go to the Globe & Mail, or even many of our subscription databases, they have been designed for a 1024-wide screen, so there’s no reason why we should handicap ourselves for a layout that nobody uses. We’re not doing anything really sexy in terms of interactivity on the site, so “IE6″ doesn’t really come into it, I don’t think.