Great work has been done by the people in the Libraries to facilitate the provision of Web-based library collections and services. As more and more of the Libraries' collections and services are made available via Web browser, we must ask ourselves, "What can we, the Libraries, do to improve our Web presence? Is it time to do a website redesign, and if so, then how can we build on great work that has been done so far?"
This text outlines a plan for redesigning the University Libraries of Notre Dame external website. The plan consists of a number of components, each building upon and slightly overlapping each other. These components include:
The balance of this text describes these components in more detail.
Ready, aim, fire. Not shoot and then aim.
In this, the first phase of the process, we will attempt to answer fundamental questions about business goals of the Libraries, the content it has to disseminate, and the characteristics of the library's primary clientele. This part of the process articulates assumptions about the website, makes them explicit, and provides a solid foundation for the balance of the process. Instead of shooting first and aiming second, we want to get ready, aim, and then fire.
A website must consider many issues in order to be useful. Since websites represent something still so very new, a redesign process should take into account all of the implicit assumes embodied in a website, make those assumptions explicit, and evaluate their relevance before they are implemented. Only after a set of valid assumptions about a website are articulated will a system for the re-creation and maintenance of a website be able to take place. Unlike other aspects of library work, the creation and maintenance of a website has few, if any, long standing traditions or standardized procedures. Questions must be asked and given at least tertiary answers before a system can be put into practice.
These questions fall into at least three catagories:
A website is built within the context of its hosting institution. It will reflect the mission, objectives, and resources of the Libraries. In order to create/design an accurate reflection a redesign plan must explicitly articulate the answers to things like:
We must have good understanding of our audience before we can create/redesign our website. We must have a good understanding of what they need and desire. So we must learn the answers to things such as:
While there are many types of websites, it is safe to assume the Libraries' website is information and task driven as opposed to purchasing and entertainment purposes. To this end we must explicitly articulate the answers to questions about website's content, content facilitating information gathering. Such questions include:
Addressing all of these questions is not as hard as it seems on the surface. In fact, many of them have been answered before but in different venues. For example, information about the Libraries can be gleaned from things like the recently completed University Libraries of Notre Dame Self-Study (October 11, 2001). The Strategic Plan For The University Libraries (November 25, 2002) is also a good place to learn about the mission and goals of the Libraries. An assessment of how the Libraries presently provides Web services will help answer many of the resource questions.
Similarly, answering questions about characteristics of the Libraries audience(s) is not too difficult. There are many places where we can draw conclusions about these issues including:
Finally, answers to questions about content can come from a detailed inventory of the Libraries existing Web presence as well as environmental scans of other peer websites such as the websites of other libraries. Such an inventory will bring to the surface categories of content and enable us to determine where our "ROT" (redundant, outdated, and trivial) content resides.
A map of where we will be going
This phase of the plan maps out a process for putting into practice the questions answered in the research phase.
The strategy phase is used to create a plan. It outlines the results of the research phase and articulates a methods for fulfilling the purpose of the website taking into consideration context, content, and users. By articulating a plan and writing it down the plan becomes concrete and is easily accessible by many people. The plan itself outlines:
Task analysis is a articulation -- a listing -- of the task users are suppose to be able to accomplish at a particular website. If user's are not able to accomplish their desired task(s), then users will not use the website. Once this list of tasks is created, the next step will be to optimize the process used to accomplish the tasks. Streamline them. Make them clearer and simpler. We will plan to implement them from the user's perspective. In other words, implement human-error tolerant design by preventing problems, reducing the possibility for error, making it easy to recover from an error, and mitigating problems so irrecoverable losses are not encountered.
The strategy phase is where very highest-level "blueprints" of a website are documented. These "blueprints" will have very little to do with graphic design. They are simply about content and functionality. Another thing to be documented at this stage are sets of scenarios illustrating how the website will be used. These scenarios depict real people with real photographs (sometimes called "personas") and help the implementors of the website focus on user-centered design.
Moving from blueprints to style guides to graphic designs
The research has been done. A plan has been articulated. It is now time to put the plan into action by designing and documenting. Design moves from higher levels to lower levels. The blueprints (flowcharts) move towards wire frames, and the wire frames move towards graphic designs. All along the way, conclusions drawn from the research phase must be kept in mind in order to reduce "creeping featuritis".
It is during this part of the process when technology's strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages are weighed. A content management system may or may not be something to be employed. Existing content needs to be taken into account. Various database tools might be something that is used as a part of the design process. Creating a style guide is also recommended here. This style guide echoes some of the content of the strategy phase, but also explains how the site is organized, why it is organized in the way that it is, and how the site can be extended in the future. The style guide ensures a continued integrity in organization, labeling, navigation, and indexing/searching functionality.
Good design as one that is simple, consistent, and having focus. Simple designs are designs where the displayed information is salient to the user. Consistent designs make the entire system easy to learn and easy to remember. Focus means placing information in the relevant locations on a page. As the Web develops there are becoming a number of increasingly used layouts with a global navigation bar across the top of the page, and local navigation down the left-hand side. Within the content of the page, it is a good idea to minimize the number of vertical alignments. Too many vertical alignments makes things difficult to read quickly.
Keeping these things in mind, the next step is to draw many mockups implementing the ideas above. This usually means drawing on pieces of paper the major elements appearing on the website. These elements will be grossly illustrated staying away from details. The details will come later. These mockups provide a means of brainstorming various designs. As the mockups become more and more refined, it is important to include things in the designs such as: layout, background, navigation, text and fonts, images, color, and client requirements. The design process can go on forever. After choosing a design, we will stick with it for a while and won't tweak it forever and a day. Constant tweaking is a sign of a less than thorough work done previously.
Information architecture has been defined as a process involving content analysis and planning, organization, providing clues to help users help themselves, labeling, searching techniques, and navigation design. There are a number of ways to organize content such as hierarchically, from the top-down (like a table of contents) and from the bottom-up (like an index). Card sorting techniques are advocated to determine the labels of things, and to create a style guide to ensure a consistent Web presence. The navigation bar should be a summary of a site's content, not an exhaustive list of places to go. Effective searching interfaces should be designed at this stage taking into consideration human-error tolerant design.
HTML, databases, search engines, content management, who continues the work, and how it gets done
The information architecture has now been put into place, and it is time to fill it with content. Now that the difficult parts have been accomplished, it is now simply the time to put them into practice.
Much of a library's content is narrative in nature and it is important outline a process to write this text effectively, including:
Keep in mind that writing for the Web has its own characteristics. Be concise. Write for scalability. When reading on the Web people are often goal-oriented. Figure out ways to help people accomplish their goals. Additionally, we must keep in mind the various elements of written Web content including: navigation, titles, body text, quotes and side bars, footers, dates updated, and corporate identities.
A website will contain more than marked up HTML text. Lists of items such as books, journals, websites, etc. are good examples. There will need to be a technical infrastructure to support these other things. Various technologies exist for delivering this content such as CGI scripts, server-side includes, search engines, the use of databases and XML, and content management systems. The important thing to keep in mind when considering these technologies is usability. Will the system be usable if a particular technology is employed? For example, what would the answer be to some of the following questions:
In short, does the application of a particular technology solve more problems than it creates.
Launching a website is a process, not a single event. There are pre-launch activities and post-launch activities. During the pre-launch phase a set of completion criteria ought to be articulated. This includes things like a listing of numbers and types of errors the system and/or user is allowed to make. For example, zero mission-critical errors, two minor coding errors, or six cosmetic errors. Keep in mind the technical infrastructure as well. Can our hardware/software handle the load? After these criteria are established, test the site, compare the result to the criteria, and if the criteria are met, then launch the site. Otherwise, repeat. It is very import to remember that testing a site is not the last thing one does because if tests are only done near the end of the development process, then fixing errors not only become more expensive, but developers and content providers will have made more of an emotional investment in the implementation and less like to desire change.
Post-launch activities includes examining log files for things like: search terms used to find the site, analyzing design changes, determining entrance pages, watching for growth over time, establishing peak usage times, finding orphaned pages, find extremely popular pages, determining a bit of user demographics.
There are at least three types of evaluation procedures: 1) usability inspection, group walk through, and 3) user testing. Usability testing involves the designer evaluating the interface based on general design principles. This is a sort of heuristic test -- a test of experts. A group walk through is very similar to usability inspection except the evaluation is done by a group of stakeholders. User (usability) testing involves observing users perform specific tasks and activities against the website.
As a part of usability inspection, we will look for these sorts of things:
The process of usability testing will be employed extensively. For example, we must decide what to test and select tasks requiring finding specific information (i.e. "What is the price of..." or "Find and article on..."). We will create tasks that are unambiguous, and don't hesitate to ask questions that can't be answered on your web site. Such an exercise will be interesting. Ask the user to think aloud.
The redesign process outlined above builds on the "three circles of information architecture." These three circles represent context, content, and users. They make up the ecology of information architecture where users are the intended audience of a website, content is the data/information a website has to communicate, and context is purpose of the website's existence. In order for good information architecture to take place, a concrete understanding of a website's audience, data/information, and purpose are necessary. Just like a architect of buildings, an understand of who is going to live there, what the building is for, and where it will be located is necessary before a plan can be created.
Building on content, context, and users, this redesign process will include other factors such as strategies and plans, the creation of meta-data and classification schemes, wire frames and blue prints, and finally graphic designs. Just like an iceberg, the majority of information architecture work is out of sight, "below the water." This entire process may not be perfect but it is a plan. It represents a set of guidelines for accomplishing our goal -- to build upon the great work already done by the Libraries and improve the Libraries' Web presence.
Author: Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>
Date created: 2003-05-28
Date updated: 2007-03-15
URL: http://ww.library.nd.edu/daiad/morgan/musings/redesign/
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