Nicola Semple

Recently, I joined a working group within the library team, that was given the task of improving the library website. This is the beginning of a blog series I will be doing, where I will be talking through exactly how and what we’ve done as a team. Hopefully, this might help others in finding their way when tasked with improving their library website.

_{^{Everything that I have done and will suggest in this blog series can be applied to any information website. We use LibGuides to create our library website, but for simplicity I will be using the word page in place of guide, when discussing main pages on the website. Those pages (guides) then may have multiple pages within them, that appear as tabs at the top of their parent page, and I will call these subpages. As below:}}

Organisational Structures

Initially, the focus of the website improvement was the library homepage. But, as I got more familiar with the website, the main issue wasn’t how the homepage looked, it was how the website worked.

A website is in many ways similar to a library. Both are places that you use to find information and much like a library with a large book collection, the usability of an information-focused website is dependent on an intuitive organisational structure. Instead of a cataloguing system, you have sitemaps. Instead of Dewey, you have a navigation bar or buttons. If your sitemap or navigation is non-existent or underdeveloped, the usability of your website is compromised.

Information Architecture and Sitemaps

Information architecture is a process of creating a structure for your website, considering the paths users will take to find information. As most of our students will always start their search for information from the home page, a hierarchical structure was ideal. When you have a website with hundreds of pages of information, categorising can be a huge step to simplifying the process for finding and accessing the information you need.

A similar hierarchical structure to this is that of a workplace. A homepage is your CEO. An item in your navigation bar is your manager. Every other single page of your website is an employee. If you have this kind of clear organisational structure for your website, finding the information you need is a whole lot quicker and easier.

I didn’t have a visual sitemap of the library website to work from, to help inform the information architecture of the website (and vice versa). Also, a lot of the website pages were not linked in any way to the navigation bar. They were floating pages. Like a book that hasn’t been catalogued. A lot of the pages were unpublished, had been started but never finished, or were used as test pages for numerous ideas.

So, with this knowledge, we had our first objectives:

• Understand the user and how the information architecture of a usable library website can improve their experience and the accessibility of information.
• Develop a hierarchical structure / sitemap that allows for easy navigation to every page from the homepage, to improve the usability and accessibility of the website.

Traffic Light Auditing

As with any large project, including a website architectural restructure, it’s best to understand the entirety before delving into the specifics. This is how I and the rest of the working group came to the point of auditing 180-pages (and even more subpages) of the library website.

First step of the audit was to understand what exactly we were working with. Taking inspiration from kanbans (placing tasks within three categories – to do, doing or done), I used a traffic light system and a good old excel spreadsheet, to categorise the state of each guide. The categories were:

• Red – ready for deletion
• Amber – was not linked to an item in the navigation bar, is an unpublished page or has content that needs improving/completing before publishing, or has duplicate content and needs to be merged with another page
• Green – is linked to the navigation bar

Red and green are fairly simple categories. Everything within amber needed work, so notes were made on the specifics, and these later became tasks on a long to do list. Each task was then assigned to someone within the working group. As we were focusing on the structural side of the website, we didn’t worry too much about the specific content (we’ll deal with this in more detail later).

Progress and What’s Next

We’ve managed to reduce the number of main pages to 120 (subpages is a whole other kettle of fish that hopefully we will look at soon). We currently have around 45 tasks left to complete on our phase one to do list and are slowly but surely chipping away at this. We have also made slight changes to the navigation bar, introducing new items (categories) for existing, but unused individual pages to sit under. This is all a work in progress, and we are aware that this still could change, depending on the user experience.

Which brings in what we will be doing next – usability testing. But more on that in part two of this blog series. Until then…