JWU Library Web Redesign Blog

2019-2020 JWULibrary Website Updates: Background and Plan

01/31/2019

David Meincke

No Subjects

TLDR:

The JWULibrary is in the process of evaluating and improving the library website.
The goal of this project is simple: to match the look of the JWU website, ensure design creates an inclusive and intuitive user experience (minimal effort)
We will be documenting our efforts on this blog. We want this to be an inclusive process, and there are a number of ways to get involved.

Background

Since the start of the Fiscal Year in July 2018, our website has been visited over 150,000 times and over 300,000 pages have been viewed. The website is the access point to many of the library’s services, including study rooms, research appointments, virtual reference assistance, database access, and book searching.

It has been a while since anyone has made any major changes to the JWULibrary website (the last was in 2016, with the addition of a navigational header and a new homepage search box). Since then, the main JWU.edu website has changed, and expectations of what constitutes a modern and usable website have changed. Furthermore, anecdotal testimony suggests that that aspects of the site are difficult to use for some of our users.

Why a Redesign?

In the Fall of 2018, the JWULibrary began a process of creating objectives and action plans that tied into the Guiding Principles of the JWU’s Focus 2020 strategic plan. In order to meet the guiding principle, “act as a good steward of our resources to support the needs of our students, faculty, and staff,” we were tasked to update the appearance and functionality of the library website.

The core web redesign team (us: David, Jenny, Kelly) formed out of this strategic planning exercise, and over the past several months we have worked on a plan to redesign the library website.

The end goal of this plan is simple: to match the look of the JWU website, and ensure that our design creates an inclusive and intuitive user experience. To achieve this goal, we will:

explore other library websites and document successful design elements
conduct tests on users and our website
make strategic, evidence-based modifications to our website
develop a new set of styles that adheres to University standards

Where we are now: Usability Tests

After spending a few months reading and planning, we began running usability tests on JWU students in order to find out how they used our site and what we could do to improve it.

With inspiration from articles and blogposts (notably, “Start with an Hour a Week: Enhancing Usability at Wayne State University Libraries” and Music Library walk-up interviews (U of Houston), we drafted a series of short usability tests that could be conducted in the library on student volunteers.

These usability tests are short: 5-10 minutes per person, with short questions and tasks (eg. ‘Find when the library closes today. How about next week?’) We are still in the early stage of this (we just performed the first series of tests last week), but we have already learned new things and made changes to our site (see the changelog for the full list).

We will write more about these tests in the next post.

Future plans

Short-term: for the near future (at least until May 2019, and likely afterwards) we will be conducting weekly or near-weekly usability tests in various locations and making small, iterative changes to the website. We will let you know whenever we make change, and if it is a major change we will do our best to consult the opinion of stakeholders ahead of time.

Medium-term: Using what we have learned from usability studies, we will develop new pages and tools as needed. We will also develop new design and style parameters

Longer-term: We will clean up LibGuide and LibAnswer content and create a documented content process. It would be great if we could get a handle on our codebase. Right now we have CSS, JS, and HTML all over the place and it would be nice to have everything in a consistent, sensible location.

How to get involved

Since the website is something we all use every day we would like to make this an inclusive effort.

Here are some ideas as to how you might get involved.

Be part of group meetings to discuss the Library’s web strategy
Help with content cleanup (LibGuides and LibAnswers
Conduct user research
Peform usability testing (develop questions, ask quesitons, be part of the observation team, or attend follow-up meetings)
Help with accessibility improvements (testing and design)
Contribute to list of good websites (and useful design elements)
Have an idea as to how you might get involved? Let us know!

-Jenny Castel, Kelly Faulkner, David Meincke

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