Web Development has been working with the Web Presence Management Group on another round of revisions to our home page, which we expect to roll out next month. If you're on campus or on VPN, you can visit our mockup to see the page in action (please note that not all links are wired up yet, so while you can use that page for screenshots, please don’t distribute the URL to users).
This homepage layout is not a major change from our current page. Almost all the information on the page has remained the same, but we've rearranged the pieces slightly to better guide users to the most useful tools and links. If the layout looks familiar, it's because we used a very similar organization on our redesign of the Health Sciences Libraries sites over the summer.
The choices we've made on the HSL sites and on this revision of the homepage were informed by our regular usability testing and by usage statistics, including data on which links were being clicked (and which weren't). Perhaps the biggest change is that we've moved our news and events information from the center column to a highlighted space in the right-hand column. This information retains pride of place, but is clearly set apart from the tools and resources that we know our users come to our site to use.
Our intent is to create a natural flow down the page. We've attempted to minimize the screen real estate required for the University header in order to more effectively highlight our search tools, which we know are the top draw on our site. Beneath the search box, we provide direct links to the most frequently used resources and information on our site, databases, journals, and hours. A huge swath of our users will find everything they expect right here.
For users who have not found or recognized the resources they need in the top section of the page, moving down we provide a set of links to our core services, as well as entry points to services and resources that may be more recognizable to novices. Specifically, we provide links to pages with resources tailored for specific populations (Undergraduates, Graduate Students, Faculty, Staff, etc.) and provide students with links directly to Library Course Pages for the courses they're enrolled in. We think bringing these LCP links to the home page is a big improvement. (More on this in a bit.) We've also added a new feature to the page where we'll highlight library staff.
Finally, in the From Our Collections section, we're moving away from the image carousel to using a single large "hero" image. While we won't be able to get the same variety of images onto the page, this dramatic presentation much better highlights our amazing digitized collections.
My Account
As a part of these revisions, we're also deprecating the My Account page. You may have noticed that over the past couple of years, the My Account page has gotten less and less functional. Changes to Primo and our move away from SFX have limited the amount of useful information we've been able to present on that page. It's gotten to the point that all we're able to display on My Account are bookmarks users added before 2015 and links to Library Course Pages. So, now that we're able to display LCP links on the home page, we're going to simply redirect /myaccount to the MNCAT Discovery my account page. We believe this will much better match expectations for the majority of our users.
But there is the matter of those pre-2015 bookmarks. These are links to databases, e-journals, and citations that users were able to store in a system developed in-house at the Libraries at a time when Primo wasn't capable of storing citations on the e-shelf. We've developed a plan for winding this system down, which you can read if you'd like more detail, but the upshot is that we'll be emailing everyone who has bookmarks stored with us (and who has been active on our site in the past year and a half), and will include all of their bookmark data in that email. We're going to send it twice, once yet this semester, and once in early January before the My Account page goes dark. Web Development will also hang on to user data for another year or so, just in case anyone freaks out.
This change will likely be disruptive for a small number of our users, but we feel strongly that this is not an area where we're adding value, and that further investment of our limited development resources in this system would be inadvisable, especially considering that Primo and other tools provide all the features we do, and better.
Thanks, as always, for your patience and flexibility as we continue to iterate on our online services. We welcome your feedback.
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