LESSONS FROM LIBGUIDESLaura Harris @ Baker College, 11.24.09

Why LibGuides?

Online system created by the university was very limited – customization difficult

LibGuides’ 2.0 features seemed to offer more flexibility

How did GVSU do it?

We started our contract with LibGuides in late December 2007

Didn’t launch until Fall 2008 Lots of workshops & how-to documents

Our initial guidelines…

Minimize white space Think about your users Quality over quantity; many users don’t

bother to scroll, so put the most important information “above the fold”

While these were good guidelines to begin with, they weren’t enough…

Challenges we faced

LibGuides is a little too awesome Librarians want to use LibGuides for everything Advice: define the scope of your guides

carefully. Stick to subject guides and course guides, and think carefully before you use LibGuides for something else

Incomplete understanding of usability guidelines Librarians may not understand the reasoning

behind the guidelines Advice…

A few tips on usability

Organize by task – “finding articles” rather than “indexes & databases” or “citing sources” rather than “RefWorks”

Be as brief as possible. Keep in mind that the attention span of the average web user is low.

Use graphics to show real content, not just to be decorative

Limit your font styles, colors, etc.

So, please don’t do this…

Or this…

One last challenge…

Browsability – Ranganath’s Fourth Rule – “Save the time of the User.”

We wanted to reduce the number of clicks our users had to make

So we did this, but it got a little unwieldy…

So this is what we’re trying next

Opportunities

Springshare is very responsive to customer feedback and suggestions

Creativity Interactivity Up-to-date information

Creativity

Interactivity

Up-to-date information

Up-to-date information

Opportunities for instruction

Interactivity – LibGuides provides a ‘feedback’ box type; you can embed many things into LibGuides

Go where the students are – using LibGuides’ API, you can embed LibGuides boxes directly into Blackboard

Assessment – guide statistics can show you which links students used the most

LibGuides in Blackboard

Guide statistics

Recommended reading…

Jakob Nielsen - usability expert Any of his books Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html 113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability

http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/guidelines.html

Robin Williams - the designer, not the actor The Non-Designer's Design Book Bad Web Design Features

http://www.ratz.com/featuresbad.html John Kupersmith – librarian

Library Terms That Users Understand http://www.jkup.net/terms.html

More recommended reading… LibGuides Style Guides from Boston

College http://docs.google.com/Doc?

docid=dg6z5m5m_93gg37x4dx http://docs.google.com/Doc?

docid=dg6z5m5m_93gg37x4dx http://docs.google.com/View?

docid=dg6z5m5m_92dghmhdd7

Presentation & links available online at:http://slideshare.net/rikhei

Questions?