Home page redesign 2004
Goals & Rationale
A. Why we want to change it
- The heuristic review we did last year (Jakob Nielsen's guidelines) show our site rates very high, except for a few small things about the home page.
- Our usability tests showed that we aren't as strong as we could be at helping new users get started using our site.
- We've seen other library home pages that do a better job at helping new users get started.
B. What we want to achieve
More flexibility, room for growth and change:
- easier to change, less rigid
- better at showing people how to get started
- dual audience: repeat users and new users:
we want to make it easy for repeat users to get to their familiar things, while helping new users get started
(repeat users OK in current site, but new users floundering) - room for growth
- it’s not just Barton and Vera in the future (portal? meta-search?)
- more room for news and hot topics and featured services that aren’t new
- room for links to "related sites", i.e. MIT Press, DSpace, GIS, Metadata Unit, etc.
- highlight request forms
- more flexibility for special links at the top
- help people not confuse web search with catalog search
- make Barton searchable from home page
- old page: all had equal prominence, new page: make certain things stand out more as starting points (groupings)
Practical issues:
- make it match the 2nd level pages (same colors and categories), because it's not time to change the whole site yet, and those pages work well
- studies show a white background is more usable than a dark background
- flexible width table (fill up the screen)
- avoid long lists of links
- include new MIT logo
- add libraries “favicon”
- stay current with latest web trends
- less busy, more white space
- implement new web standards, i.e. style sheets, etc.
- accessibility: access keys for disabled users
- make links more obvious (by underlining, etc.)
- more standard to have your logo in upper left corner
- not so many square corners, add some curves
C. Specific ideas
- Include Barton catalog quick search, if possible (we think it is, but we're not 100% sure). We can decide later which searches should be in that menu.
- Add link to "your account" from home page.
- MIT Libraries dome logo in upper left
- Site Index page contains a link to our web search engine instead of showing it on the home page. We want to avoid people confusing web search with Barton.
- Giving link should still be prominent on home page.
- Add Faculty link, so we now have Alumni | Visitors | Faculty.
- Make the Quick Links visible, separate out the order forms. Then adjust the pull-down menu for quick links on other pages to match the same order and groupings.
- Add "Tip of the Week." (use tips similar to slide show recently shown in Infinite Corridor). Sometimes instead it could be "Featured Service."
- More room for news headlines (spotlight).
- Add a "how do I?..." section with links to very brief pages. Especially we need to tell people how to find articles (articles titles not searchable in the catalog or Vera).
- Keep links to main sections of our site, since we're not changing the rest of the site yet.
- Use a white background. Keep some hints of other colors that match the rest of the site (blue stripe, etc.)
- Add list of "related web sites" - i.e. DSpace, MIT Press, Metadata Unit, etc.
- New MIT logo in footer.