Redesign hell
The last month has only reinforced for me why a piece of me hates working on site redesigns. They always get done on a tight deadline and there are always problems because you never have enough time to kick the tires. And the bigger the site is the more this is magnified. Another issue that always arises is getting good user input. We ran focus groups and had mediocre at best participation. We could have tried to run more focus group, but this would have thrown off the time line.
The issue of timing of deployment of a new site creates a rock and a hard-place scenario. Missing the deadline for deploying literally means waiting another year to deploy because Public Services freaks out if you make a big change mid-school year, let alone mid-semester. Nothing ever goes as planned, there is feature creep and stress yourself out as the deadline approaches.
Additionally, redesigns are tons of work and when you deploy them, typically the feedback you hear is negative. While some of this feedback is valid (in our case the book search sucks and needs to be rethought), some of this is “who moved my cheese” syndrome. A link used to be a certain place and people are mad that it isn’t where it was anymore.
I think this is also magnified when a site has been the way it is for a long time. In the case of UH Libraries more than 6+ years. Our new site has a completely different world from the old site. This is a result of the fact that the web has dramatically changed in the last 6 years, data from our users, and the fact that the University website redesign is taking a different world view.
Most of the people we’ve gotten feedback from have been faculty. They don’t like the new site, particularly the homepage. I think this a direct result of the fact our old site was very librarian/library centric in the terms it used and the resources it pointed people to. Faculty get the library jargon more than undergrads. Usability testing at other institutions have proven this and in our own card-sorting faculty labeled things using more library-like jargon. But a significant piece of our redesign was meant to address the fact undergrads have difficulty knowing where to start on the site. This set of users want different things from faculty and I will honestly say the homepage is geared more towards them.
However, we created a faculty gateway to lead faculty to content which is more appropriate for them. But how do you decide what research tools (catalog, databases, digital library content) go on the faculty page? With 200+ databases alone this is a fearsome challenge, that we shouldn’t even be attempting. Instead we need to focus more on personalization so that users (faculty in particular) get a personalize view of the library’s resources that they can customize.
But that is a piece of phase two of the redesign. When and if my staff get to work on that, heaven only knows at this point.
This is why I am glad my university has a decent template we can use. I was resistant at first, but now I see the beauty of having one template for all departments – less confusing for the students, less work for us, and next time the university on changes for all the sites, they can make the changes to the stylesheet on their end.
PS – that said, I really like the new design. The placement of information on the page is very logical to me.
Much of our styling (fonts, colors, some of the layout stuff) came from campus because they are engaged in a campus site redeployment. However because they haven’t made the new campus site available to the world yet we look like the odd duck. Part of me can’t wait to see how the people who are reacting negatively to our site will feel about the new campus site.