Tag: Services Portal

Services Redesign & Content Overhaul

Not too long ago, I posted about the revised IA of the Services section of the website. Staff consultations followed particularly to apprise them of recommended changes and to take the opportunity to revise the content. I created mockups, which I got feedback on. Finally, the page went live.

Consultation is Key

Based on the revised IA, I began an extensive consultation process with all the teams involved. While the methods differed, the most common process was by meeting with the librarian in charge, who would discuss the changes with the team and then assign a technician to help with the content revision. At other times, I just asked the librarian if they would have a problem with someone else revising the page.

I focused on the fact that the recommended changes were based on exercises with both staff and students. While the content could stay more or less the same, it was also a good opportunity for the team to make revisions. (Some pages hadn’t been revised in 10 years.)

For the most part, the major changes were discussed with the librarians and the assigned technician took care of the detailed content revision. I also did all the revisions for the technology area, since that’s under our team’s purview. Librarians that didn’t have a technician to help, I assigned the pages to the technician who does web editing support or the co-op student (who also helped with pages that have no owners).

The Old Services

The Services section was comprised of 125 pages, and the landing page looked like this:

Old Services Landing Page
Old Services Landing Page

Pretty awful, isn’t it? The old IA was a bit of a mess as well, and a lot of pages had the same information or just a single paragraph. The organization seems to have come about via the “we should make a page about this, and put it here”, meaning there doesn’t seem to have been a strict management of content. Not sure duplication of content was reviewed in any way either.

From the card sort, it’s obvious that some of the pages are definitely not where users might typically look for them. Here’s the list of pages in the old IA:

[code collapse=”true” gutter=”false” title=”Old Services IA”]
Services
Audio-Visual Resources & Services
Searching for Audio-Visual Material
Bookings
Borrowing Audio Visual Material
AV Copyright
DVD Player Lending
Digitized AV Resources
Equipment
Screening Facility
Search Other AV Collections
Other Audio Visual Resources
Borrow from Another Library
Search Other Libraries
NRC-CISTI Discover
Borrow in Person from Other Libraries
RACER (Interlibrary Loan)
Using RACER
RACER FAQ
Tips for Faster Interlibrary Loans
Policies
Ryerson’s Lending Policies for External Institutions
Article Not Available @ Ryerson
Request this Title via Interlibrary Loan
Borrower Services
Circulation Records Privacy
Courtesy Notices
Direct Borrowing
Extended Loans
Fines & Penalties
Holds
Library Cards
Alumni & Retirees
Application Forms
Distance Education Library Cards
Faculty & Staff Library Cards
George Brown Library Cards
Nursing Library Cards
Others
Student Library Cards
Loan Periods
Lost Library Materials
Maximum Items Borrowed
Recalling Library Materials
Renewing Materials
Returning Library Material
Self Services
Special Loans
Course Readings (One-stop Service) – no changes to subpages
Facilities & Technology
Access from Home
Change Machines
Computer Labs
Lost and Found
Photocopying
Printing
Study Space
Telephones
Washrooms
Wireless Access (wifi)
Instructional Services
Laptop Loan Program
Laptop Loan FAQ
Ronald D. Besse Information & Learning Commons
About the Commons/FAQ
Besse Commons Hours
Codes of Conduct
Floorplan
Mission
Photo Gallery
Ronald D. Besse
Software
Vision
Geospatial, Map and Data Centre
Instructional Services
Learning Commons Lab (ILC)
Research Help Services
Technology Support
Writing Centre
Services for Distance Education Students
Services for Faculty
Audio Visual Services
Direct Borrowing
Electronic Resources
Faculty Borrowing
Library Cards
Ordering
Orientation Classes
Reference Services
Targeting Journals for Publication
Instructions for Authors
Journal Impact Factors
Periodical Directories
Periodical Title Abbreviations
Recent Publications
Refereed Journals
Services for Graduate Students
Borrowing & Renewing
Computers & Study Space
Direct Borrowing
Graduate Workshops
Reference Services – Graduates
Thesis Submission
Services for Persons with Disabilities – no changes to subpages
[/code]

Content Revision & The Authoritative Copy

Other than merging a bunch of pages and getting rid of redundant ones, I consolidated a lot of information where we needed one “authoritative” copy: hours, policies, and fines. It is particularly important that we do not have conflicting information for circulation staff, because they are the ones that deal with fines, and lost and damaged items. Obviously, this also prevents confusion and possible frustration on the part of our users. A short guideline now exists on our intranet in regards to this issue.

We also moved our existing FAQ pages to LibAnswers, our FAQ database.

A couple of the ‘Services for…’ pages don’t really belong to anyone and they suffered from some of the same problems as the old Services page. I got our co-op student to look them over and suggest changes. Here’s what we came up with for the Graduates page:

We decided to take out redundant links, and links that were not of special interest. Then, obviously, we decided to categorize them a little so it was easier to read.

Mockups

As per usual, I created a number of mockups for the web committee to review. In an attempt to make it look a little more consistent with Research Help, I used the coloured boxes motif and played around with different ways of organizing the pages.

People were actually very against the boxes, and I agreed that it seemed like trying to force the look on Services. Based on the feedback on which they did prefer, I created clean black and white versions of two of the original mockups.

The group preferred mockup #1 with the icons on the right hand side. After a couple of more changes based on the committee’s feedback, I posted it in the staff room and sent it out by email as well. Sadly, I didn’t get any feedback though I suppose that’s not necessarily bad.

Services Revised

After all the consultations and content revisions, we pared Services to 90 pages (vs. 125). This is the final version of the IA:

[code collapse=”true” gutter=”false” title=”New Services IA”]
Services
Audio-Visual Resources & Services
Searching for Audio-Visual Material
Booking AV Material
Borrowing AV Material
Digitized AV Resources
Other AV Resources
Borrower Services
Fines & Penalties
Holds and Recalling Materials
Library Cards
Alumni & Retirees
Application Forms
Distance Education Library Cards
Faculty & Staff Library Cards
George Brown Library Cards
Nursing Library Cards
Others
Student Library Cards
Loan Periods
Lost Library Materials
Returning Library Material
Self Services
Borrow from Another Library
Direct Borrowing
Search Other Libraries
RACER (Interlibrary Loan)
Using RACER
Tips for Faster Interlibrary Loans
Request this Title via Interlibrary Loan
Course Readings (One-stop Service)- no changes to subpages
Facilities & Spaces
Computer Labs
Software
Lost and Found
Ronald D. Besse Information & Learning Commons
About the Commons
Codes of Conduct
Mission & Vision
Photo Gallery
Ronald D. Besse
Geospatial, Map and Data Centre
Learning Commons Lab (ILC)
Writing Centre
Study Space
Telephones
Washrooms
Viewing AV
Instructional Services
Research Help Services
Technology & Tools
Access from Home
Change Machines
DVD Player Loan
Laptop Loan Program
Photocopying
Printing
RefWorks
Technology Assistance
Wireless Access (WiFi)
Services for Distance Education Students
Services for Faculty
Scholarly Communication
Journal Impact Factors
Open Access Author Fund
Refereed Journals
Services for Graduate Students
Graduate Workshops
Services for Persons with Disabilities – no changes to subpages
[/code]

The ILL pages haven’t actually been revised yet as they were busy with their projects, but that should happen in the next little while. The page count and the new IA are based on an already revised section of ILL, so that may differ from what actually happens in the future.

I also ended up writing a fairly long email to list all the changes as requested that I sent out to all staff.

The final version turned out fairly well I think.

New Services Page
New Services Page

The Ever Changing Project and Timeline

The Original Project
Not many people know, but when I began my current project/job, I was hired to revamp the Instructional Resources pages of the library website. Essentially, it was two pages. That’s right, two.

The Growing Project
Of course, trying to compile a list of all the instructional resources at such a large university still took a long time. And since part of the goal was to centralize these tutorials into one place and also migrate them to wiki, a whole web portal came out of it, which of course involved various staff and committees. The idea was to get it all done by the end of summer, but of course, because the tutorials also needed updating, that didn’t happen. To date, we have not migrated even half of the Help portal (of the list you see under Finding, only Journal Articles comes from the wiki). Nevertheless, we launched the portal page itself.

Redesigned Help Portal
Current Help Portal

The New (Related) Project
Out of my work on the one portal grew the plan for another portal, the purpose of which was to list the services the library provide. Our library has apparently never had such a page, which seemed odd to me, but true (I had never known of a page like that in all my time here).

Interestingly, this portal had much more user testing than consultation with others, because it was putting together a new portal and would not affect any existing parts of the website. We also rethought the design so that we minimize the amount of screen space we’d be using and in our testing, we found people had no problems with the navigation and those who tended to skim through pages found this design better/more useful than the older Help portal design, because they were forced to read the headings to move further on, and thus were more likely to read them than to skim.

Services Portal screenshot
Current Services Portal

Although some pages have yet to be migrated into WordPress/wiki, most of it is done even if it’s not all public. We prefer not to change things so close to the end of term (especially since some of them are really popular pages) and there’s a bug or two that need to be fixed with the WordPress pages. Soon though, I hope.

Two More Projects
So with Services launched, the plan for this term was basically the rest of the main site minus the home page (and Branches since that only really needs a migration). One is the Find Portal to replace the current navigation of Catalogues/Journals/E-Resources, and the other is About Portal to replace the current About Us section.

Ever Changing Timeline
It became fairly clear a few weeks ago that due to the need to prioritize other projects, my co-worker was not going to be available to do usability testing for the two new portals. After discussions with my supervisor, we decided that we’d have to push the timeline back for testing and we could really only go as far as preparing for it. Nevertheless, we’ll be pushing forward with About since that’s an area that is not used quite so much by our users and most of the decisions would come from other divisions. Find will go as far as a prototype site with preparation for usability testing.

Find Portal prototype screenshot
Find Portal prototype

Unfortunately, I struggled with the organization of the Find Portal, so another look will be needed before and after usability testing.

Here’s hoping that the new timeline goes through.

Ever Continuing Projects
So, beyond launching the actual portal pages, a lot of work has continued with migrating everything to WordPress and encourage staff to help update existing pages or provide us with new content. As I mentioned, much of Help is still simply linking to old pages (some were so out of date, we had to take them down), but Services is moving along and I hope to get it all done by the end of next month. Nevertheless, as all websites, it’ll be continual project that will be taken up by the rest of the team (and perhaps a new co-op student in the summer).