NYU Libraries' official website has 53,138 NYU students as users and more than 1224 librarians as stakeholders. I created a better digital website to ensure NYU students to access all library resources they need.
NYU spent millions per year to buy research guide resources to help students finish their papers. Librarians compile those resources into the website to help students with their research. But the current user experience makes resources not be accessible for students.
• Improve the user experience of the NYU library website including consistency, usability, legibility, and accessibility.
• Make students find the library resources easier and improve their efficiency.
• Create the accessibility checklists and make trainings to educate the stakeholders.
I started my qualitative research by interviewing 12 NYU students to find their user needs and pain points. The interview questions include: What’s your main purpose when you use the library website? What’re the most useful functions for you to use? etc.
I evaluate the NYU's current website user flow and build information architecture to find more than 30 UX pain points. I divided these pain points into four different types: consistency, usability, legibility, and accessibility, and marked the priority into three different degrees: low, medium, and high.
The eye-tracking study showed that people can only get access to 82% information from the top navigation bar but get 98% information from the side navigation bar. Side navigation encouraged for easier navigation and helped users to focus on the content longer.
↑Eye-Tracking Study Results: 82% Information acquisition
↑Eye-Tracking Study Results: 98% Information acquisition
↑Redesign Before: Top Navigation Bar
↑Redesign After: Side Navigation Bar
Half of the elements came from the current official website and I used inspect mode to check the CSS style code and restore them in Sketch. Another half of the elements were designed by myself. I added more elements to make the design system more solid and build it a website which can be sharable for others.
I applied the NYU style guide to redesign 100+ pages including research guide homepage, research guide pages, research guide search page, subject database page, database homepage, database pages, database search page.
Our team put accessibility in very high priority. NYU librarians are LibGuide authors to create the content for students directly. We did the Librarians Author Training for Accessibility monthly to help them meet accessibility metrics. This is part of our training PPT.
I illustrated 10+ drawings for the NYU library homepage to increase the website conversions by 68%.
↑Draw 10+ illustrations at this part on NYU Library homepage to increase conversions by 68%
The official website was launched in December 2019. The illustrations on the homepage helped to increase conversions by 68%. Meanwhile, the click-through rate of the 100+ redesigned website went up to 48% after the launch.
