Glendora Public Library
Information Architecture
The current website is part of the City of Glendora site. This structure is technologically outdated and displays a lot of information that is overwhelming to users. To improve the site and overall user experience, we created a mini-site so that the library page has its own navigational structure and functions independently from the City of Glendora site.
Problem
Library Director, Janet Stone, of Glendora Public Library, is seeking recommendations on ways to improve her website’s information architecture and overall user experience. The current site is technologically outdated and overflowing with content due to poor organization and labeling. Content should be reworked so that users are more successful in finding specific information, known-item seeking, in areas such as downloading forms or identifying age-specific storytimes.
Approach
Project Proposal
This document outlines what the director is wanting to accomplish and a description of the approach to tackle the problem. It also lays out a six-week project plan that explains what we’ll do at each step, the value of that exercise, and the estimated time it will take to complete the project.
Librarian Interviews & Literature Review
The goal of this exercise is to learn about people who use public libraries, why they use the site, and what information they’re looking for. A research protocol was developed to ensure we were gaining consistent information from each interview.
Personas
Once the interviews and literature review were completed, personas were developed to help us identify site goals and prioritize key tasks.
Content Analysis & Site Map Creation
In this step, we assessed the existing content of the Glendora site to see what could be repurposed, what needs to be reworked, and identify what content is missing and needs to be created that aligns with the key tasks and goals defined in the research stage.
An early iteration of the site map to be tested.
Assess Design and Evaluate Taxonomy & Labeling
Using Treejack, we developed several retrieval tasks to test the initial version of the proposed site taxonomy. We recruited and tested with six participants so that we could identify the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed taxonomy.
Updated site map with revisions based on Treejack study.
Develop and Test Wireframes and Key Workflows
The final stage of this project was to create wireframe sketches of the library homepage and high-priority workflows that represent key navigation. These wireframes were tested using Chalkmark and updated based on user feedback to ensure the user can accomplish key tasks.
Results
Final Report
Bringing it all together, this document outlines each step of this site redesign process and provides the results of each study and our final recommendation for the Glendora Public Library.