NYU Official Website
Redesign

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.

View Official Website

Company

New York University
Bobst Library

Platform

Desktop

Time

June 2019 - Dec 2019
Launched in Dec 2019

My Process

Interview
Information Architecture
Angile Development
Accessibility Testing

My Role

I was the sole UX designer for the six-month project.

Team Members

2 Data Scientists,
2 Front-end,
2 Product Desigenrs

Team Members

3 Product Designers
2 Product Managers
1 User Researcher

The Challenge

NYU official library website doesn’t meet the UX metrics and students cannot find the resources they want

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.

The Goal

Create a better digital website to ensure NYU students to access all library resources they need

• 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.

Process

01. Interviewed NYU students to find their pain points

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.

02. Built information architecture to make UX audit

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.

Solutions

01. Legibility: Side navigation instead of top navigation bar

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

02. Consistency: built the NYU library style guide

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.

03. Usability:  Redesigned NYU official pages involving 100 page+ adjustments

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.

04. Accessibility: Conducted Librarians Author Training for Accessibility monthly

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.

05. Illustration: Created 10+ drawings to increase conversions by 68%

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%

Results

68% conversions increase and 48% click-through rate up

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.