The Library’s website will be retemplated over the summer, in line with the rest of the University. I’m working with the UC web team at the moment to redesign the homepage in the new wider template, and set up the underlying pages. We are now at the point where we are seeking feedback from the rest of the Library.
Could you please look at the mockup of the proposed homepage and the About the Library page using the new template for lower level pages. This latter page will also work via the link from the proposed homepage, but no other links will work yet. Please let us know what you think of these pages via comments on this posting.
Note that the 2 search boxes are not in their final form yet. It is likely that for 2010 these will be the new Summon Search (whatever it is called) followed Catalogue Quick Search as it is now.
Catherine
Layout only I assume? Nothing to do with content?
Looking nice!
Initial quibbles:
* It’d be nice if the blue of the searches/’how do I find’ could pick up the blue of the banner more closely
* I realise the wording here is anticipatory anyway, but please can we *not* call Summon "Summon"? No-one will have a clue what it does.
* Perhaps a bit of padding at the bottom of the AskLive logo to get it in better alignment with the text – but then part of that may depend on browser anyway.
* On the ‘about’ page the arrow icons by the addresses look funny – would be good if they could either point to the top of the address or be removed.
* Any chance of more task-oriented headers/link names, or is that not in the scope of this redesign?
Deborah
I agree, a big improvement.
Library Home Page:
* The centring of the old menubar on the page is excellent.
* In light of usability testing, any chance of changing the wording of "Reference" to something more immediately understandable? (Or is that beyond the scope of retemplating?)
* I wonder about the position of the "Quicklinks" – might they be lost off the bottom of some displays and so not noticed? any chance of placing them higher on the page?
– Combining the old Quicklinks and Bookings seems a good idea for simplification.
"About Page"
* Arrows on addresses – I agree with Deborah that they look funny; better if removed entirely (though arrows in "See also" box look good).
Finally, is there going to be an opportunity to usability test the new layout at all? Or some other way of monitoring how easy it is to use?
Cheers,
John
Perhaps:
– Right hand column too busy – too much information!
– How do I find? doesn’t stand out enough;
– Contact for distance students please
Thanks for comments already received. Keep them coming.
It is layout only and not content. We are going to be very hard pressed to get it all converted, and all content that has to be updated, (eg Eng/PSL),done by the start of term 1 as it is. The first priority is to put our existing content into the new UC design.
I’m already following up about the arrow icons. To get any text to display correctly in this area it has to be bulleted, which is what is creating the arrows. I’m hoping we can get that changed.
I’ll ask about the blue colour. It may be a standard colour for the UC style.
Catherine
I would be happy to change the name of the link "Reference" to something else, if anyone could come up with a term or text (that we could get consensus on) that describes what’s on the page. "Dictionaries and Encyclopedias" doesn’t cover it all.
Catherine
The other problem with "Dictionaries and Encyclopedias" is that it’s USan spelling; and "Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias" is one character too long to fit on a single line.
"Stuff wot you’d normally go to Wikipedia for"?
Um. "Quick facts"?
Deborah
Reference tools? Reference links?
Adding a single word may make it stand out a little.
On "About the Library" I find the left hand black bars too intrusive. They dominate the page and overwhelm the centre text and headings. What about using a blue from the banner and less black?
"Reference" should be "Reference" – This is what it is on the signs on the walls and this is what the materials are. It is something you need to learn if you want to use a Library effectively. If you don’t know what the link refers to click on it and you will get an indication. We too often try to go too far explaining things when one of the basic rules of web usability is to keep it as simple as possible. The more words you stick on the page the less people read them. Anyway isn’t this a content issue rather than layout?
It looks as though the "Reference" query is too big to address during the retemplating process.
I hope we don’t lose sight of the issue, though:
* "Keeping things simple" is often a good idea, and also it isn’t unreasonable at a university to expect students to do some learning of library terminology and practice. On the other hand, usability testing on the subject guides demonstrated that "Reference" means very little; it may as well say "Don’t look here"!
* I made no suggestion as to what terminology might be better than "Reference", largely because I know that the list off the Library home page is broader than dictionaries and encyclopedias. Perhaps best would be something like Deborah’s suggestion of "Quick facts"; then again, sometimes a bit of inaccuracy is best if most people are looking for, say, dictionaries and encyclopedias!
* "Encyclopedia" is not just a US spelling: the Oxford Manual of Style and the NZ Oxford Dictionary offer it as the only spelling; OED gives it as a valid alternative spelling for all users of English; a search on Google in the .nz domain gives 5 times as many hits on "encyclopedia" than "encyclopaedia". I think the "ae" spelling is on the way out.
Cheers,
John
I agree that Quick links need to be higher on the page. I think that the Library Help Desk, AskLIVE box should be nearer the top of the page as well. My brain likes quick, helpful information at the top, followed by newsy stuff later. Caroline Anderson.
John, now I’m almost as disillusioned as when I found out "segue" doesn’t rhyme with "intrigue"!
Btw, I posed this as a hypothetical/discussion topic on the "Library Society of the World" group and suggestions included:
* "secondary sources"
* using alt-text / tooltips to clarify
* "Dictionaries and encyclopaedias" using Unicode æ
* "Factual Information"
* ‘This is why "reference" is actually a pretty damn good word.’
* "books where I can look sh** up"
* "Small Containers of Stuff Like Wikipedia Only Better"
* "Look it up!" (plus someone commenting in approbation, and another agreeing and saying they’ve seen that used)
But yes, it may be too big an issue to really look at while redoing the templating.
Deborah
I know it is not about content at the moment, but The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,(a name which has always intrigued me), uses the phrase Encylopedias, Dictionaries, & Other Quick Fact Sources to describe its online reference collection. Perhaps we could use Quick Fact Sources instead of Reference. Caroline Anderson.
Hi
The News items loose their impact with the begining of each article showing. Is it possible to just have the heading bigger or a stand out colour then you link through to the full story?
Also the More News and RSS feed etc have no impact at all easily missed. I think this is an important part of the website to advise and generate feedback from the students
Thanks
Liz
Just a few suggestions:
On the Home page
Can we swap the position of Quick Links and Recent Additions. Or even put quick links above the "how do i find?" bit.
I agree with Liz RE the prominence of RSS feed and particularly "suggestion board",though this is a prob with the current pg anyway and i have no ideas for how to improve them.
RE the About page –
seems rather "listy" to me with a lot of scrolling needed to read/scan the main content – could some sections be "columnised" (not sure if that’s an actual word)i.e. displayed alongside each other – e.g. policies and publications?
Otherwise looking great!
Again, thank you for all the comments. Keep them coming.
However, some of the changes requested are beyond our control as the layout is pre-determined to a large extent by the template provided by the UC design. The quicklinks are a case in point, as the design places these at the bottom of the home page, and places news at the top of the right side.
The background colour of the headings is determined by what college or department you are, and at the moment the colour for service departments is black (though I have heard that there might be some room for negotiation on this). We won’t be able to have blue though, as that is used by Science (bright blue), and Law (blue grey). But there are some people who like the black background, so I think this is very subjective and we can’t please everyone.
Check out the pages of some other departments and colleges to see what the basic layout requirements are. The ICTS is another service department – look at their rebranded page.
Catherine
"Quick Fact Sources" sounds good to me!
On the black background – it makes it a bit more obvious that the white-"Library"-on-black under our banner is a kind of faded black. Could that sub-banner line be actual black instead? Even better, could it be done in white text on a black background instead of as an image?
The "about" guide seems a bit of a jumble to me due to the way it’s been categorised/alphabetised – eg "Library Guide" seems something that should be linked in the introductory text, not as the second to last link on the page. But again that’s content/usability. In terms of the template, it certainly *looks* nice to me. 🙂
Deborah
Kia ora,
I would prefer to see less on the page, it appears too cluttered to me.
What I would change would be, take out or minimise the size of the News and Recent Additions columns on the right, and maybe put it at the bottom, somewhere less prominent. These columns are more about "us" and less about what they want.
The welcome bit is dwarfed by the black tabs, so maybe have that a bit bigger and brighter?
I am not sure if the 3 pictures with search etc work so well in the new design format?
cheers
Ariana.
I’ve just been talking to Phan from the web team again about some of the issues that you’ve identified. She confirms that many of the details identified are to do with the standard UC stylesheet, and are under consideration eg the Deborah’s comment about the dark black headings making the faded black under the banner look washed out. If you look on other sites in the UC web you’ll see the same thing – it’s not unique to the Library. I think we have to wait for the web team to make improvements across the whole UC website, though we can keep feeding these comments through to them.
As regards the page looking too cluttered – this is a comment we often get, yet no-one can agree as to what could be removed. At the last redesign, I tried to go back to basics and asked a brainstorming group what was essential on the homepage. We got more links than were already there!!! Needless to say, they weren’t all put there, but since that redesign 2 years ago, at least 4 links have been added, but not 1 removed.
Catherine
I agree with Catherine (and others) that there is too much stuff on the home page. In fact I think there is WAY too much stuff. If we can’t decide by consensus then can one person just arbitrarily decide and everyone else just be quiet for a while. At the moment we just look very silly and confuse everyone. It should be like storage in your house – Everytime you bring something home you have to get rid of something. Start with only absolutely critical things and then everytime you want to add one you have to take something else away first. A bit like Serials subscriptions too…
This of course is not a template issue however but it would make the template issue a lot simpler!
Out of sheer whimsy: Q:\Deborah\whimsy.gif
(I deleted some things, bundled some things, reordered some things, and renamed some things eg Campus Branches because we’re all One Library. 🙂 )
Deborah
The Quick links aren’t quick at all if you have to scroll to see them. It seems that the 3 images take up too much space and/or there are too many links.
I agree with those who call the effect ‘cluttered’, mostly by the effect of the news & recent additions columns which display a lot of text. Also do we really need the yellow contacts box when we already have a link called Contacts?
I am very pleased to know that the library website will have a new template for the start of 2010.
My comments on layout are as follows:
I feel that we should make much better use of the “How do I find” box.
I would recommend it is placed directly under the Catalogue Quick Search. I think we should include in this list the items currently listed under Resources and totally remove the Resources column. So a customer would click on How do I find, then select an option. We could then also list Dictionary as a separate item to Reference.
I would move the Quick Links up to a column and move the column “About” to the bottom of the page. However, I think the link to Hours and Campus libraries should move into the Quick Links. Is it possible to have a direct line to Pay Online from the Quick Links
In my opinion the space taken up by the 3 photographs above Search@ Library etc are too large. I would remove them entirely and just have the links across the page as they are now or put them into a column.
As some other staff have mentioned I would prefer to only see the heading of a news item.
I also do not like the photograph which we use across the banner. I think this could be improved with something more stylish. Another option would be to move the greeting “Nau mai, Haere Mai – Welcome to the Library” up into the main banner area so that the greeting actually has some prominence.
I would like customers to have some guidance regarding the Summon Search. I don’t think we should use the word Summon but also feel that it we should put an instruction under the box which tells the customer in general terms what will be searched.
For as long as we continue to offer Ask Live there should be a link to it from the home page.
Joan Simpson