Homepage revisions

Today Web Development is rolling out some minor revisions to the Libraries' home page. These changes are based on observations we've made in usage stats and during a series of usability tests. It is our hope and expectation that these changes will make a measurable improvement in user experience and productivity with minimal disruption to users' established workflows.

I'd like to draw your attention to a few changes:

- The "Find" menu has been renamed "How to Find" to better reflect the content of the menu.

- The search box has been simplified, with no left-hand search button. In addition to Advanced Search, we're placing direct links to the MNCAT Discovery home page, Browse, and E-Journals catalog in the drop-down menu next to the search button.

- The Ask a Librarian block has been replaced with a more prominent button next to the search box. This button will send users to a brand-new help page which links to a snazzy new version of the QuestionPoint Qwidget (see help.png).

- The Course Pages lookup form has been deprecated in favor of a link directly to course information on the MyAccount page. Usability testing showed us that it was hit or miss whether students knew the course designator/number info required to successfully fill out this form. So instead, we're sending them to My Account, where we can give them links directly to the courses they're enrolled in.

- Journals have been broken out into their own block. The journals we're displaying directly on the home page are those that have been most frequently searched for in our homepage search box over the past nine months or so.

- Hours and Workshops have also been separated into their own blocks, rather than hiding workshops on a tab behind hours.

- Layout blocks have been re-ordered on the mobile view in order to bring highest-use information to the top. This change is based on usage data that showed many of our most frequently clicked links required a great deal of scrolling on mobile devices.

- Finally, under the hood we're further consolidating and standardizing the code we use to style and lay out our web sites and applications, taking advantage of work Eric Larson did on the recent UDC redesign.

Many thanks to Eric Larson and Jen Tantzen for their work implementing these changes, and to the members of Web Presence Management Group for their thoughtful comments and review.

Tablet resolution

Mobile resolution

Desktop resolution