About Our Website Redesign

Goals

  • To create a more effective, efficient, engaging site that is consistent, easy to learn to use, enjoyable to use, and affords tolerance for errors when errors are made. 
  • Bring our core services to the top, make them easier to find and use.
  • Create user-focused site that continues to enhance the user experience for our key audiences: faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers.
  • Create a design process that is iterative and more agile to meet the evolving needs of our users.
  • LibraryWeb is an official university and libraries' publication, and its design, navigation, and content will reflect the university and libraries' publication standards.   
  • Incorporate our core team's skills and knowledge in identifying innovations and technologies that should be incorporated into our design, experiment with those, and incorporate them where appropriate and effective.
  • Identify and address programmatic and organizational strategic goals.
  • The Redesign will meet Section 508 criteria for basic accessibility requirements.

Scope & Priorities

  • New Information Architecture
  • New visual design throughout the site
  • New navigation, both global and local (more flexible)  
  • Develop Agile process to allow for iterative design
  • Defining and addressing our user group(s)
  • Internal and external communications and feedback mechanisms 
  • Incorporate user testing and user feedback as part of the ongoing iterative, agile development 
  • Integrate look and feel across CUL/IS online systems

Key Design Principles

  • Make the site more usable for our patrons/users, particularly our faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers 
  • Design for fluid/responsive screen size to effectively accommodate mobile and other devices (responsive design) 
  • Simplify navigation, and use persistent and consistent navigation categories
  • Group "like" content together
  • Make search and access front and center (top task) 
  • Create a welcoming affective design that is user-centered 
  • Save the time of the user
  • Make the site as guessable as possible, and reduce the users' learning curve 
  • Create a process that allows for an iterative and agile visual design, interaction design, and information architecture  

The Redesign Team

The Redesign Working Group

Design Principles

The Redesign Wiki (read only) 

Questions? Please email us at: lweb-redesign@libraries.cul.columbia.edu

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