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:

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

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:

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

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).