Discussion
Oct. 1, 2012 meeting: Nicole, Stephanie, Lisa
These drafts are based on:
- input from our Sept. card-sorting survey
- looking at some peer institutions
- knowledge of our own services and what the Libraries want to promote.
Card-sorting results:
Results were all over the map with many different ideas, names and solutions for grouping much of the info on our site. Our 40 users came up with over 200 different category names! There was conceptual agreement around 3 areas: (search/find/catalogs), (library locations & hours), and (about us/general info). There was not a lot of agreement about all of our guides and help and other services, such as publishing, video support, etc.
We also asked them: "what are the top 3 things you come to the MIT Libraries website to do or find?" Highest counts were for:
- finding e-resources
- looking up known items in Barton
- requesting items from other libraries
- hours
- Barton Your Account features (renewals, holds, due dates, etc)
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Considerations:
A. Navbars follow you wherever you go (on most pages) and serve as useful, quick ways to get to frequently used pages.
B. Categories on the home page have a dual purpose: 1) to show what the libraries are about and can do for you, and 2) they provide a quick way to get to frequently used pages.
... therefore.... should the home page categories always match exactly the 2nd level nav bars? (maybe, maybe not)
C. We may want to use this as an opportunity to emphasize some of the things we do for people that are beyond how they usually think of libraries. (personal content management, scholarly publishing support, managing data, etc).
Navbar draft 1
Search | Locations/Hours | Borrow/Request | Research Support | Recommended Tools | About Us
Navbar draft 2
Search | Locations/Hours | Using the Libraries | Help | Recommended Tools | About Us
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Areas of agreement:
1. We agree that there needs to be a Search category. Later it may become a "discovery" search box that gets embedded into the top of pages. For now it could have a drop-down nav with names similar to our home page search box tabs. We didn't discuss yet whether this page (or a new version of it) should continue to exist: http://libraries.mit.edu/search/index.html
2. We agree that there needs to be a Locations/Hours category. It will contain links to each library location and hours, and also links to info about visiting non-MIT libraries, study spaces, and all things involving the use of our physical spaces.
3. We agree that there needs to be an About Us category. This is something people come to expect on every site and can hold all the general information that doesn't fit into other categories, such as staff directories, jobs, giving, etc. We would probably tweak the list of things on this page: http://libraries.mit.edu/about/about.html
Areas we have different ideas about:
4. We need a category for "getting your stuff." We struggled with what to call it.
a. Borrow/Request or b. Using the Libraries
This would contain info such as:
- Get books and articles delivered from non-MIT libraries: ILB, Borrow Direct
- Requesting/borrowing (from Circ FAQ)
- Course Reserves
- Suggest a purchase
...etc.
5. We need a category for all of our help options and research support (including publishing), and we recommend putting all options into one category, whether they are mediated, or self-help.
a. Research Support or b. Help
This would include info such as:
- Ask Us!
- Research Guides by Subject
- Publishing help (there could be a whole section of the page for publishing links)
- Library classes & workshops (need a better page for these)
- Data: finding & managing
- Research consultations
- Subject experts, Ask the Expert
- Specifications for Thesis Prepartion (one of the top most hit pages on our site)
.... etc.
We could make a nicely organized page that groups all of this stuff in sensible ways. (there are lots more of these kinds of pages)
6. It would be great to have a category for Recommended Tools, since we are in the business of recommending lots of useful tools and we want to promote that as something we do. Many of these tools are very useful for research and we offer workshops and guides on how to use them.
This could include:
- Your account (Barton.... again, since it's so useful)
- Browser extensions, toolbars, widgets (LibX and more)
- Personal content management (see new guide we have for this)
- Citation software: EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero, Mendeley
- Apps for Academics
- Keeping up with research: email and RSS alerts
- RSS feeds for new books
- Betas: experimental services & tools
- Bioinformatics tools
- Data management tools
- GIS tools
- Social Science Data tools
... etc.
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UX staff: Please give us your feedback and comments in the comment box below. Thanks!
1. Do you agree with the high-level concepts? (six categories)
2. Do you agree with the category names? Do you have other ideas for the category names?
NOTE: We will test these drafts this month, using an online survey tool called TreeJack. We'll recruit a different set of users than the ones who did the first card-sorting test.