“Design is creativity with strategy”
Well, that pretty much sums up the last couple of weeks for me and the website I have been dreaming about for *years* for our school library. I have been thinking about, and confused by, exactly what I wanted to accomplish with my site. It has to:
- Be a useful tool for students, teachers, and parents to access all the library goodies I work really hard to provide
- Be a tool to increase *usage* of the 21st Century digital tools to which I allocate a large part of my library budget
- Be a useful tool for creating the school library ‘brand’, and help me push out library resources beyond the school walls and school day. In other words, make me look good!
- Be as good-looking on mobile devices as it is on desktop computers
- Help me corral the many helpful links, tools, websites, and other digital ephemera that I use in my library instruction, but in a way that reduces the ‘cognitive load’ that my current catalog home page has (see photo below – I mean really, who has time for that?
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Sounds simple, right?
Well, not for me. Thankfully, I have the incredible luck to be working with a thoughtful and talented web designer on creating a website that will serve my students and community far better than the ‘Page of 1000 Links’ above. For the last week or so, he has asked me questions that made me rethink many of the assumptions I have as a librarian. What does someone really want to accomplish, when they do X? How can we make that path plainer and easier to get to?
My designer (have I said how much it tickles me to be able to say ‘my designer’???) may not completely understand what I do all day, but he does know the right questions to ask in terms understanding the people who will use the website, and getting me to focus on the heart of what they are really looking to get from the library. He also has an eye for design when it comes to user interfaces. This will make the website not only useful, but visually appealing, too. I’m having a hard time not sharing a screen shot of the draft page now, but I really don’t want to spoil the effect of dropping the final version when it is ready.
Questions, questions, lots of questions!
This has been my homework! I can have my students answer these questions during their library class, and I hope that parents and staff will click through and answer their questions when I email the link. Once the data is in, we will know how well I predicted what everybody is looking for when they visit the library website, and if I correctly guessed the priorities for where things should be displayed. With the information in hand, we will make adjustments and move forward. I can already think of a few additional things I’d like to add (sorry about that, Scott!)
If you have ever spent time thinking about user interfaces, or gotten out of your own head and thought like a student/teacher/parent, let me know how it changed your thinking. In the meantime, stay tuned for what comes next in the library website design journey.