Website Redesign Based On User Research Findings
Problem:
The Taylor Community Library is a public library located in Taylor, MI. The library provides access to various books, media, technology, and community activities both online and in-person.
Taylor Community Library has successfully built a website that provides a lot of content and information for users such as a calendar a community events, access to library resources and services as well as general information about the library itself.
Taylor Community Library recognizes that their website has become antiquated and that the amount of content and information provided on the website needs to be better organized so that their users can more easily find and access exactly what they are looking for. Because they are a small library, they do not have the budget to perform this research and redesign in-house and have reached out for assistance.
Actions:
To achieve the project goals, the following activities were provided:
- Project Proposal: Learn about client’s information architecture needs for the Taylor Community Project website and provide a description of how the problem(s) will be solved.
- User Research: Learn about the people who use the Taylor Community Project. Specifically, why they use the site and what information they are looking for.
- Information Architecture Design: Design a new information architecture and communicate design decisions with a content analysis, classification scheme and site map.
- IA Design Analysis: Assess the Information Architecture design decisions, analyze the data and make any necessary revisions to the design.
- Finalize IA Design: Finalize the Information Architecture design into wireframe and workflow deliverables.
Results:
Final deliverables for this project included Personas based on literature and user research, recommended tasks the website should support based on user research, a full content inventory of website with recommended actions, a sitemap and wireframes.
Lessons Learned:
This project furthered my understanding of using user research to understand what features are most important to consider for a website redesign as well as the process of generating content inventories, sitemaps and wireframes.