Library Web Chic

So as I’ve probably told you before we are in the middle of a massive website redesign and UH Libraries. This effort is one which attempts to tackle both back-end and front-end problems of our site in one massive swoop. When I started this process the sheer scope of the back-end problems scared me. There was SUCH a mess and so much to do in order to enable library staff to update website content. In truth though that has been a picnic compared to the front-end piece of the redesign.

So why is the front-end piece of the redesign such as bear? Well several reasons. First, in the process of the front-end redesign focus group we have discover functionality and content missing from our site that has to be addressed in the redesign. This fundamentally means more back-end stuff to build and more content to “shake” out of librarians and staff. Second, creating a navigation scheme for the site has proved to be a challenge. Partially because we are trying to fit within the confines of the University’s new website redeployment. While I like the redesign of the campus site, the homepage in particular is a massive improvement, it makes some assumptions about navigation that I find myself questioning.

The assumption I’m most concerned about is the necessity for a strict hierarchy for the topical navigation scheme. We setup our usability testing based on this idea of strict topical hierarchy and now I’m thinking that it was perhaps a mistake. Personally I like a little more flexibility. Additionally, a strict topical hierarchy doesn’t deal with the different possible facets of a page. For me this is exemplified in the tension between Topics and Tasks. If this wasn’t enough to make me uneasy, I read Karen Schneider’s review of Everything is Miscellaneous and my stomach started to churn. My own copy is on its way from Amazon and I am fearful that once it arrives that I may want to go back to the drawing board when it comes to navigation.
Why you ask? After all you consulted your users. Well yes, but we gave them the framework by which to talk about the content of our site and that framework was a hierarchy. To quote Schneider, in Everything is Miscellaneous, “the third order is about the richness of relationships, the value of more over less, and—by implication—the arid sparseness of categorizing systems that insist on impossibly unambiguous definitions and neat, clear-cut borders”. The card sorting exercise that we asked our focus group participants to do asks them to create these clear-cut borders, without really inquiring if such distinctions were necessary or desirable. The book’s author goes so far as to say on his blog that the the book is “an argument against the idea that there is a best way to organize ideas”. For a web designer who is grasping for the most usable way to organize content on a web site this is kind of a radical statement. A part of me agrees with it. Both from the point of view of strict hierarchies being bad and from the perspective of having the navigation of the site revolve almost exclusively around topic.

With the site redesign deadline looming, I don’t have time to have doubts. There is too much more to get done between now and August to be backtracking. A part of my sees it all coming neatly together and another part of me sees a train wreck. Honestly, this is nothing new for me though. I feel this away everything I work on a site redesign and it has always worked out. Sometimes there are just several days of less sleep leading up to the deployment.