This week Atkins Library unveiled a redesigned website in time for the start of the spring semester. The new site matches the look and feel of the rest of the university's websites to create a consistent experience for students, faculty, and staff. Featuring task-based global navigation, the new site will also improve the user experience for our patrons, making things more intuitive and easier to find.
“Through the entire redesign process, we’ve kept our users at the center,” said Anne Cooper Moore, Dean of Atkins Library. “Rebuilding from scratch gave us the opportunity to design a website that is intuitive and accessible for all users, regardless of ability.”
The redesign entailed extensive usability testing and assessment efforts using a data-informed approach to every stage of the process:
- Analysis of top tasks visitors do/wish to do based on Google Analytics, surveys, and interviews of all user groups
- Search analytics
- Open Card Sorting to test website architecture
- Creation of User Personas to help ensure the new design met the needs of different types of users with a variety of needs and backgrounds
- Tree testing presented users with scenarios of common actions to see how efficiently and successfully they navigated to the information location using a "bare-bones" navigation tree
- Extensive research into best practices for university library websites
Atkins Library has created a Video Tour of the new website to help users become familiar with the new task-based navigation, search features, and icons for most commonly-used resources.