Website design
Jul 16th, 2008 by Bob
There is a new article in College & Research Libraries (volume 69, number 4, July 2008) by a former colleague, Jennifer Duncan, on the role of Information Architecture in designing a web site. Jennifer is now at Utah State where she and a colleague did research on what they call “third-generation library Web sites,” sites which are more “usable and cohesive.”
They interviewed stakeholders (staff and users) to determine both absolute requirements and recommended requirements for various aspects of the library’s web pages. They learned a lot in their reseach including the importance of continual usability testing to ensure that the design is “user centered and not simply appealing to Web designers and librarians.” The most useful thing they learned was the importance of having what they call “multiple redundancies in link placement.” This is because there is no such thing as a typical user and therefore it is hard to predict how that user will look for a given piece of information. They therefore settled on “multiple pathways to many content areas.”
Their website is http://library.usu.edu/)