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Chris Jasek of Elsevier’s User Centered Design Group Answers Your Usability Questions
Chris Jasek earned his BS
in computer science and a
master’s degree in human
factors engineering from
the University of Illinois,
and then started his career
with Reed Elsevier. For the
past 11 years, he has helped
design and ensure usability
of information products
including nexis.com, ScienceDirect
and Scopus. Today Chris leads
Elsevier’s User Centered
Design Group, which he helped
form.
Q: What is the best way to organize all the features my library website offers?
A: The best and really only way to do this is by first understanding your users and the main tasks they come to your website to accomplish. Each task typically has a goal of trying to obtain a certain piece of content (e.g., a journal article or the reference desk hours). It is also beneficial to rate each task/content by how often different user groups perform/use it.
Next, group the tasks/content into four to six broad categories.
Categories I recommend for a library website are:
- Research: Finding books, articles and other materials
- Course Reserves: Finding reserve material
- My Account: Renewing items, checking status of requests and so on
- Library Information: Getting hours and locations, library news or staff contact details
• Help: Finding ways to access tutorials or Ask a Librarian
These categories form the information architecture of your website and should be used as the main organization of your site and as a navigation bar or site map.
So now that we have the site organization, what do we do with the homepage? One possibility is to surface three to four important links or features from each category. This reinforces your site's organization and helps users quickly accomplish their tasks. To make the right choices on links or features to surface, you may need to gain more understanding of users’ needs for each of your categories. As always, get usability feedback on the homepage design.
The most important way librarians can improve usability of their websites is to improve the overall organization of features offered. The exercise described here can help you do just that. 
