Redoing a library website

For many years, my library has been maintaining a number of websites with various degrees of success. IT recently redid the public university website, but before they did so there was an extensive library website available on it. We hardly ever touched it. It was viewed as mostly information for potential students, and there were no live links to databases and other resources. Thus, some of the information available on this site was rather out of date and perhaps even inaccurate.

As a second website, I maintain our subject guides via an external wiki. I update these quite frequently. This is the only site that we have the ability to update at present.

Finally, the main library website is located behind an intranet. This has been a source of frustration for a number of reasons. We are constrained within the restrictive parameters of a content management system. I recognize that most universities use content management systems for their websites, but the one used for our intranet has been particularly difficult in the past. To be fair to IT, I think it isn't quite as restrictive as it seems. However, we currently do not have the ability to make modifications on our own. This then means we have to bug IT every time we add a new database, remove one, need to update a description, etc. This would certainly become a lot of work for IT if we wanted to get much fancier with our design. A final source of frustration with the intranet is that we cannot link anyone directly to a page within it. They will just be bumped out to the main login screen. Once they login, they are taken to the first page as usual, instead of the one you hoped to link them to. This results in a lot of "click on blank, then blank, then blank" ad nauseum.

Thus, we decided it was high time to redo the website in such a way that we will have control over updating the content. We also want to have only one main library website to update instead of two. And, of course, we want a website on the public side of things so that we can link users directly to the information they need. After going through the proper channels and obtaining permission, we were able to start working towards a website that meets all these requirements. The subject guides will continue in their present form.

In order to make a website that will be helpful to everyone, we are doing a variety of testing. Thus far, we have conducted several focus groups (to be discussed further in a future post). We hope to do individual usability testing soon on the prototype of the new site. If usability testing reveals a variety of problems, we'll resort to other techniques, such as card sort.

I hope to continue posting as we move through this process. I am also very hopeful that all this testing will result in a highly user-friendly website for our patrons.

Usability Testing of the OPAC

Recently, the User Services Advisory Committee of OPAL has been deciding on what changes to make to our Innovative Interfaces OPAC (online catalog - for now, the current version is here and the in-progress version is here). It has gotten me thinking about what our users want. Librarians can argue back and forth until they are blue in the face about which link to put where and how visible to make certain options, but our users never do things the way we want them to or the way we think is best.

Judging by a quick search of the library literature, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of usability testing conducted on OPACs. Perhaps this is because we, as libraries, only have a very minimal amount of control over the appearance and options. Most of the control rests in the hands of the companies charging us extraordinary amounts of money for OPACs that are always several steps behind what our users expect.

So maybe it's time to usability test the OPAC. It would be really interesting to see what our users find confusing and what they expect. Then, we can make those changes over which we have control so that they best meet our users' needs.

And actually, that brings up another question. What do the companies that create and maintain these OPACs do in terms of usability testing? Do they do much testing? Any? Because you know the search giants of the world must do an incredible amount, so shouldn't some be done for the catalog, too?