The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Author: Antonio Barrera

  • Website Redesign Project Update – July 2020

    Over the past few weeks, the web redesign team and the local library owners have been hard at work developing and deploying an audience research plan in collaboration with NewCity. A brand survey specific to each campus was widely distributed to faculty, staff, and students. The survey asked participants to choose words and images that best represent their library, and to reflect a bit on why they made those choices. We were thrilled to receive over 2,000 responses, along with a lot of thoughtful feedback that will help us make design decisions that are driven by local values and priorities.

    Baseline usability testing was launched at Camden earlier this week and will be conducted over the next few weeks at RBHS, New Brunswick, and Newark. The usability study is looking at how users reach our site and complete common tasks, and also asks some more general exploratory questions that will help us understand how local sites might most effectively convey local information along with access to centrally provided resources. The studies differ slightly from unit to unit, depending on what the local library owner groups have defined as the most important tasks for their key stakeholder groups. Given this baseline information, we’ll be able to measure whether user perception and performance around these key tasks have improved during development and after launch. We’ll be sharing the results of our audience research before too long.

    Through content analysis and interviews, NewCity has been digging into the ways content “happens” on our site. As a complex organization with many moving pieces and a vast amount of information to provide to a diverse body of users, content governance is a major challenge. This is going to be one of the most important aspects of the redesign: not just the site itself, but the development of a manageable, logical governance model that will enable us to maintain content that is accurate, fresh, and engaging.

    Once the audience research data has been analyzed, the local library owner groups will each meet again with NewCity to synthesize the results and begin workshopping ideas, informed by the brand survey and usability studies. If you’re interested in contributing to the work around your unit’s aspirations for a new site, please check in with your project team representative. They can provide access to a virtual whiteboard where we’re tracking thoughts about values, impact, audiences, and success measures. The information gathered there will be wrapped up into the workshops later this summer.

    As always, you’re welcome to reach out anytime with questions or comments. Send us an email: webservices@libraries.rutgers.edu.

  • Web Redesign Project Team Update – March 2020

    Participants sort cards during NewCity’s on-site visit in February.

    The website redesign project has gotten underway. We are currently in the discovery phase, which has several objectives: to identify stakeholders and learn about their goals for the project; to uncover our needs as local communities delivering shared resources; to understand our technical infrastructure and plan for the future; and to strategize future engagement with our internal and external audiences.

    The project is being managed as a joint venture between Rutgers University Libraries and NewCity, a website design company experienced with higher education, large non-profits, and commercial companies.  The project team, which is co-led by Antonio Barrera (Library Applications and Development) and Amy Kimura (SUS), includes members from across RUL: Doug Allen, Matt Badessa, Megan Lotts, John Powell, Jonathan Torres, and Yini Zhu.

    On February 11 and 12, 2020, three members of the team from NewCity came for an on-site visit. They met with the project team, Cabinet, and additional faculty and staff representatives from across the campuses to lead a number of activities designed to explore the needs of our stakeholders, communities, and to reflect on each unit’s similarities and differences, while considering success measures for this project. One of the main goals was for NewCity to get to know us so they can be sure they’re capturing the authentic voices of the libraries.

    NewCity will use these conversations and stakeholder interviews, together with a wealth of other qualitative and quantitative data, to build a comprehensive Discovery Report that they will deliver in the coming weeks. This report will help inform our site’s design and content strategy. We’ll make it available on the project team’s website, where you can also find other key documents related to the project.

    We plan to launch the new sites in June 2021 in order to minimize mid-year disruption. That gives us ample time to build the sites, provide training, and populate the new spaces with helpful, up-to-date content that best fits the need of each location and supports streamlined delivery of our shared resources. We will continue to update our project team site as we make progress, so check back frequently.