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2/06/2006

PLCMC Redesign Prototypes

Later this week, I'll be participating in an exciting venture - a focus group study with users to help guide the redesign of our library site. It's hard to believe that the current design of the site is nearly five years old -- in web years, that would be about 120 years, I'm just guessing :) Anyway, the site has served us well over the years, but a definite facelift is indeed in order. Web design has changed so much over the past few years, that's it's hard to keep up with trends. The bottom line is that no matter how good or flashy the design is, its got to met user expectations and for that I'm grateful that we're doing an outside focus group.

Anyway, if you haven't seen the design concepts yet, you can view them below. Note the designs are merely large images at this point with absolutely no subsistence behind them. Take a look and let us know your thoughts... which one do you prefer? What do you like about the design? What do you dislike? And what may we be missing that would really make our homepage more useful to user?

Design prototype A

Design Prototype B


Come on, give me your thoughts - I know you have some!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like prototype B. It looks a lot slicker that our current site. I like the colors and I like the way that links to the catalog and online resources are so obvious.

It also looks a little less cluttered than the other prototype.

I'm not sure that patrons will use the events calendar though. I think they're more likely to want to browse for events by type rather than by date.

I'd also like to see the ability to search the catalog right from the homepage, with no extra click.

It looks like we're in for a nice change.

-wn

Chris said...

I like Protype B. Much cleaner and less confusing than having everything right up top on the default page.

I agree that users like customization.

Online databases are used by patrons, but I've found they first need a deadline and a reason - the library is closing and it's raining and there's a research paper due in the morning. Then they still need a push and a little info to get them to databases, even if they are regular Web users.

Anonymous said...

It's none of my business, but for goodness sake go with prototype B!