The Agenda - Faculty and Staff Newsletter

Tag: website redesign project

  • 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.

  • Website Redesign Project Update – May 2020

    Screenshot of NewCity discovery report
    The discovery report is available on the project team’s staff resources site.

    The Discovery phase of the website redesign project has officially concluded. Feel free to peruse NewCity’s Discovery Report, which outlines their findings from their onsite visit, one-on-one interviews with some key stakeholders, discussions with the core project team, an intercept survey, and analytics. They tease out some of the characteristics that make RUL’s different units unique, as well as what unites everyone, and what some of our biggest challenges will be as we move forward with this project.

    We’re excited to be starting audience research this month. Over the next ten weeks, NewCity and the RUL project team will be working with local teams and directors to survey and interview our user groups, define the brands and goals for each campus, and move toward a baseline understanding of what our users need and how they behave. While we’d love to be able to meet face-to-face with our users, we’re not letting COVID-19 slow our progress—we’re working with NewCity to develop a robust research plan that we can deploy entirely online.

    To help coordinate, conduct, and analyze this research, we’ve formed a Local Library Owners team, an augmented version of our core project team. We’re happy to welcome John Gibson, Samantha Kannegiser, Angela Lawrence, Amber Judkins, Christie Lutz, and Victoria Wagner to the project.

    Audience research doesn’t apply only to our external users; we’ll be working with the RUL audience as well. As we develop a web presence that has room for more “local flavor,” we need to be sure to empower local content editors to create and contribute content and design that works best for their units. Our new site will employ a component-based system that will allow local contributors flexibility and ease in creating and customizing local content while keeping the site sustainable for the central technical team.

    The project team continues to meet bi-weekly, with additional meetings now being added as we begin the next period of intense focus on audience research.

    You’re welcome to reach out anytime with questions or comments. Send us an email: webservices@rutgers.libanswers.com