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Library Website Redesign: An Interview

This isn’t a common Librarian Design Share topic, but one of the biggest design projects a library can undergo is the redesign of their website.  I am fortunate to work with two individuals who recently led redesign efforts at the Muhlenberg College Trexler Library, and I met them to discuss their process, priorities, challenges, and advice for other library’s attempting this endeavor.

Introducing

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Brittany Robertson, Library Technology and Digital Experiences Librarian
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Nicholas Cunningham, Public Services Assistant

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What inspired the website redesign?

Brittany shared that the redesign was inspired by assessment of the user experience.

“We knew that our site was difficult to navigate based on information from surveys and interactions with staff and faculty.  Our site was also dated, and we needed to update the underlying infrastructure. We could see from Google Analytics that most of our pages weren’t getting a lot of traffic.”

old website.PNG

Brittany and Nicholas shared with me the steps that they took to redesign the website, which, by the way, took 1 year from start to finish and “I’m not sorry that the full redesign is over,” Brittany said, “but it’s important to see the website as an ongoing project, needing continuous improvements.”

What was your process?

  1. The library’s web applications team initially decided to do the website redesign – it consists of several  individuals from each library department. However we created a design subcommittee (4 people, one from each department) so that design conversations were inclusive but the work could progress forward.
  2. The web applications team participated in an initial brainstorm about “what we wanted to accomplish with the new site.”
  3. By considering the needs of different types of patrons “the subcommittee came up with a couple of ideas for layouts, and engaged in a couple of rounds of feedback and editing.”  Layouts were shared with the full web team and then each department.
  4. A design was chosen and each member of the library staff helped to organize and review content.  “It’s a big site, and we’ve come up with the plans of a maintenance schedule so that all the content is reviewed annually.”
  5. We completed one round of assessment with students.  The assessment process (a series of tasks to be completed by the student) was reviewed by the IRB.  Changes were made to the website if students had consistent trouble locating information.

What were the main changes to the site?

Brittany and Nicholas described the changes they made to navigation, which was their first priority.  They determined that about seven menu items is ideal for successful navigation in order to “get patrons to where an item might be.”  They hope that if a patron can intuit where a piece of information would be based on headings then they would find it successfully. They altered site navigation design so that it resembled the design of other library platforms, including OCLC discovery and EBSCOhost databases, making navigation familiar and easier to use.  Similarly, consistent use of color scheme helped to tie all library interfaces together.

How did you stay organized?

They used agendas, taking minutes during meetings, and spreadsheets of tasks that they checked off as they were completed.  The hardest part? “Remembering what decisions were made and why,” Brittany said, “…we did struggle with that a bit.”

The final result – and the future

The website is visually appealing and ready for another round of user experience assessment, which will be completed later this year.  You can take a closer look at the navigation and content by exploring trexler.muhlenberg.edu.

new-website.png

Brittany is currently thinking seriously about accessibility – and implementing the accessibility changes that she’s already worked hard to design.  She recommended consulting W3 for accessibility guidelines and noted that she does want to test the final result with a screen reader.  She has worked hard to make sure that users of all abilities can navigate the site successfully with techniques such as shortcuts to skip navigation so that the entire menu isn’t read before the user can move on to the main page content.

Advice for Others 

When I asked them for advice they might give to others seeking to redesign their library website, Brittany and Nicholas emphasized flexibility and communication.

“Don’t get tied down to one idea” – Nick

“Get anyone who wants to come up with an idea to do it– but it is really hard to get people to come up with ideas.” –Brittany

“Whatever plan you set for the redesign process, chances are you’ll have to modify it/make it longer and there is nothing wrong about that.” – Brittany

“Creativity is a challenge” – Nick

And finally…

“Have a set date to go live.  Otherwise projects tend to drag on endlessly. “ –Brittany

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Design for Accessibility: LibGuides

Library resources can be hard to locate, but all of the university libraries I have worked at have used Springshare libguides, called help or subject guides, to make resources more visible to the public.  Perhaps yours does too!  If this is true, I have one tip for great libguides:  design for accessibility.  If you design for accessibility, your guides will be better for everyone.

While the intention of libguides is to make resources more easily found, they can still be a significant hurdle to individuals with sight impairments or literacy challenges.  Thanks to Springshare, the solution is actually quite simple:  use the information structures available to you.  First, create boxes with names that help students identify what information will be found within.  Using headings like “Finding background Information” and “Finding scholarly articles” will help students identify where to find the information they need.  Then, within these boxes, choose the correct information type or structure.  If you are including a link, use the “link” structure – the same goes for “database” or “book from the catalog.”

Why is this useful?  Because assistive learning technologies, like Kurzweil, utilize the hierarchy of data structures to allow users to skip from one to the next quickly.  Therefore, if a user is interested in finding scholarly journal articles they can easily skip past the box labeled “Finding background information” and go to the box titled “Finding scholarly articles.”  If they know they want to search in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts they can easily skip through the other databases listed.  The alternative to this quick hop through information resources is a comparatively slow process of listening to a lot of text in order to find the desired resource.  I’ve seen this many times – librarians commonly select to use the “Rich Text/HTML” structure, which allows you to include text, and links, at will.  The lack of structure in this kind of content makes it inaccessible and unwieldy.

One of the nicest information types to use is “book from the catalog.”  By allowing users to paste the ISBN number for a book into the proper field, Springshare automates and standardizes the rest of the bibliographic information included in the recommendation.  This is also important for accessibility – individuals can learn a significant amount of information without having to leave the page and the standardization allows users to anticipate what information to expect on the page. Utilizing this information structure also makes your guide look nice!  The cover of the book can easily be included, and the visual element breaks up the text-heavy guide.

accessible libguides

Revising libguides to abide by this accessibility principle provides great value to the library’s user community.  If your library uses another application to direct students to resources, take a look at the structures available or be sure to utilize the correct html element in your guide creation process.  Leveraging the hierarchy of guide design and descriptive elements of html can make a huge difference for the access of individuals with differing needs.

 

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Designing for Accessibility

As librarians and designers, our users should always be at the forefront what we create. Sometimes this means tailoring our creations to a specific audience, like students in a university setting or teens in a public library, but often our users are anyone who comes into the library space. When you create those fliers or infographics to post on your LibGuide, are you also designing for the population of users that have a vision impairment or use assistive technology? Can those users get the same information from your design as someone without a disability?

To me, that question is what is at the heart of accessibility.

I know, the A-word can be intimidating. Everyone is talking about it, and there are laws and guidelines and a lot of work goes into making something accessible and don’t we already have enough on our plates? I get it y’all, trust me. Addressing accessibility is a whole Thing, which is why Jess and I have decided to dedicate several posts specifically to the topic. Because really, accessibility* is not out of reach for any us.

It should come as no surprise that there is a panoply of online resources to help you create accessible documents and (thankfully) most of the are free! But in an effort to not overwhelm you with information, I’ll leave you with one resource that I have bookmarked and use every time I design something new: WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker.

While all of WebAIM’s resources are great, I especially love the Color Contrast Checker because it not only tells me if the colors I’m using pass or fail Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards, but it gives the ratio of how close to passing/failing I am. All you have to do is plug in a color in hexadecimal format (or hex code) for foreground and background, and voila! You have your report.

screenshot of WebAIM color contrast checker

If you don’t know the hex code for the colors you’re testing on and it’s within your browser, you can use an extension like ColorZilla to pick the color from a webpage. If it’s something you created and want to test, you can always use something like Image Color Picker to upload and grab the color.

Testing the color contrast of your text and images can help you create documents that are accessible for all sighted users, including those with vision impairments. Although it may not seem like much, it is a critical part of designing for accessibility.

Stay tuned for the next post in our Designing for Accessibility series and if you have an accessibility related topic or design you’d like to share, let us know!

 

 

*Footnote: The term accessibility can be applied to many things, but for the most part we’ll use it specifically with web and document accessibility in mind.

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Enhanced by Design – Presentation & Handouts

One-half of Librarian Design Share is headed to Knoxville, TN to present at the 2017 Library Collective Conference alongside Amanda VerMeulen (St. Mary’s College of Maryland) and Dan Vinson (Mount Mary University). I’m super excited to be presenting with these awesome folks, and wanted to be sure to share our presentation slides, handouts, and other resources with Librarian Design Share readers. The focus of the conference is “Make it Beautiful, Make it Useable” which was all the sell I needed to attend. The conference schedule looks amazing, and I’d encourage you to check it out.

Here’s the info about our session:

Enhanced by Design: Creating user-informed, aesthetically attractive projects for your library

In this session participants will learn how different visual materials can address user concerns uncovered through focus groups, surveys, and ethnographic studies. Products created from data gleaned through these methods aren’t inherently beautiful, but by applying aesthetic design principles to these projects we can create products where usability is enhanced by design.

What this session IS about: basic user research methods, applying basic aesthetic principles/theories to creating visual materials, design-decision making
What this session is NOT about: in-depth session on graphic design or aesthetic theory,
how to analyze user research data (no coding, no stats).

Some questions to think about before the session:
What is a problem you want to solve in your library?
What is a big picture question you have about your library/users/etc.?

You can check out our session slides below. It’s a mix of lightning style talks, discussion, activities, and Q&A. We hope the session will be interactive and fun, and we’re looking forward to learning from people who attend.

We also have a number of resources we’re sharing with participants, including:

You can also find all of the designs highlighted in this presentation on the Librarian Design Share Google Drive in the Enhanced by Design Presentation 2017 folder. If you’ll be at The Library Collective Conference too, stop by and say hello!

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How a Design is Revised

Today’s post is a little different in that we’re not just sharing a finished design, but showing and describing a design revision. This submission comes to us from Brittany Iverson, Learning & Research Services Librarian at Montana State University. A walkstation was recently added to the Library Commons, and Brittany was asked to create an infographic with how-to-use instructions and the benefits of walking while working. Here is the first draft of her work:

Continue reading “How a Design is Revised” →

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Making Your Library Promotion Pop

We’re all working to make our designs pop as librarians, but it’s probably rare that we actually sit back to consider the principles behind the designs we are making. However, just a couple of months ago, I was asked by the Medical Library Association to present on this topic.  So, I am posting the presentation as both a review of basic design and also as an inspiration for design, because it was (by far) the hardest part of making this presentation!

When you make a PowerPoint presentation about design, you want it, uh, designed well. I’m tired of the themes that PowerPoint has to offer, so I usually design my own when I can. While I didn’t come up with the title for this presentation, I did want to play off of it. “Making your Library Promotion Pop” conjures up many themes–popcorn, pop art, popsicles…  I tried them all unsuccessfully, until I came across an unlikely inspiration saved on an older flashdrive: a New Year’s Eve party invitation that I admired some time back and planned to recreate for my own use.  The fireworks and the colors are modern, graphic, and exciting and the elements of the invitation just kind of created the theme for me.
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You never know where inspiration will strike…or pop!
If you are interested in the original PowerPoint file, contact me.
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Branding Your Library

We librarians tend to make a lot of help sheets and signage to assist patrons as they use our resources.  That’s really what Librarian Design Share is about, right?  But even with best intentions, we don’t always fully think about the way our publications as a whole look and feel to our patrons.

I think Librarian Design Share would be remiss if we didn’t talk standardizing the look of your library’s publications, or branding, if you will.  Brands can highlight something unique about your community (perhaps it’s near water or you’re known for an historical event), your library (maybe you have an awesome stained-glass window or a spiral staircase), or it can be based on something more abstract, like colors, shapes, or even text.  We based our library branding on the pretty rainbow of colors our bound journals make on the shelves.  Everyone has bound journals on their shelves, but there’s something about the color arrangement and the mass amount of them that make the way they look in our large, light-filled space memorable. Here’s our general publication header that can be copied to any document:

new brand

Whatever standardization you decide upon should happen across the board–from all the pieces of paper that a patron might see in your library to your web presence. This is our website’s look:

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I thought my library was well on the way to doing this, but a quick audit of our documents online and on our slat wall exposed at least three previous brands that are still in use on our handouts.

old brands

Yikes, you know what my new project is…

Think about it terms of your favorite store: their shopping bags have the same look as their store signage as their website, right? So should our libraries.  It’s about making things more consistent in the minds of our users. More simply, it’s about showing our users that we care enough to keep things updated, neat, professional, and easy for them to digest.

If you have great examples of a branding campaign you’ve created and implemented at your library, we’d love to see them! Consider submitting them to our site and sharing them with your colleagues.

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Democratizing Design

What do you do if you’ve labored for hours (or days or weeks) over a design and your coworkers just don’t like it?

When I create something new, I always show the prototype to a few key people as I’m in process.  I can get their early opinions and shift my design if it’s necessary before spending too much time and energy on it.  In my dream world, I would use 5 or 10 minutes of our monthly staff meeting to project my designs on the big screen, and everyone would care as much as I do about colors, images, and spacing, and readily and openly share their thoughts on each element of the publication.

But this doesn’t actually happen in real life…you’re lucky if you get someone to say “yeah, I like it,” right?  And if they say something negative, like your design is too simple, or that it misses the point, or that –gasp– it’s unprofessional, it almost becomes a personal affront. This is because design often feels very personal after you’ve poured your time and energy into it.  However, it’s important to remember that when someone contests your handout, infographic, or web slides, they really aren’t attacking you.  It’s likely that the person is just coming from a different perspective, and it’s worth hearing them out and considering revising because design, in essence, is not personal at all.  Design is for the public, so it is of the utmost importance to consider the public’s reaction to a design.

A situation like this recently happened in my library, and the solution was to have our staff vote in an anonymous survey (we used SurveyMonkey) on their top choice between two designs.  Be prepared, though, in a democracy, your choice doesn’t always win!

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Look and Feel Constraints

As librarians we’re often designing websites, handouts, and publicity materials that have to conform to certain institutional design standards. Whether you’re in a library that requires its logo on every brochure or at a university with very specific font and color branding, you’ve no doubt felt the constraints that an established look and feel can have on your design creation. Here are the boundaries we work within:

Veronica

The college I work for is in the midst of a branding evaluation, meaning that at some point in the next few years we’ll likely have a revised logo, colors, and font that will be standard on all of our print and web publications. For the time being, here’s what we use:

homepage-screenshot

  • A fixed-width web template
  • Variations of gold and two types of blue to match our college colors
  • A very intricate logo
  • A standard header that takes up a good portion of the screen

Our web team is working hard to prepare for the changes that this branding evaluation will likely bring to the college’s virtual presence. Like me, the web developers hope that our new university template will be responsive, rather than fixed width, and that the college header will be much smaller. My hope is that we modify or eliminate the standard logo in favor of a simplified text-based brand. I understand the need for color constraints, so I’ve tried my best to work within the colors of the college.

To make up for the space taken by the college header, I’ve tried to keep the library header small, although I’m planning to revise it to take advantage of some of the wasted space in the middle and make the header menu more visible. I’ve also tried to make the search area and announcement slider the main focus of the page. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been, but it’s a start.

How do you work within web template constraints?

April

I work at a large university hospital with a specific department that concentrates on maintaining our brand so that it is not diluted or misconstrued among our thousands of employees and our international audience. Our brand standards call for a certain set of colors and fonts that should be adhered to when creating designs, even those that are used in-house.  Complying with these standards (see below) has been my biggest challenge when designing publications.

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One of my first charges as a new hire was to redesign our General Info page (that you’ve seen here).  My first draft looked pretty similar in design to what you’ve seen, but the colors were my favorite lime green, grey, and orange, the fonts didn’t conform, and I neglected to add the institutional logo.  My supervisor quickly showed me the brand standards on our intranet, and I modified my design to incorporate theirs by carefully replicating the CMYK numbers and adding in other elements.

It’s not always easy, as I find the standards limit my creativity at times, but because I now understand and respect the reasoning behind the standards, I’m trying to follow them more closely in everything that I create.

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