Team Members: Aizhan K., Cameron L., Nanako K., Vitoria D., Valerie D.
My Role: Qualitative User Research, User Interface Design
Tools Used: Google Suite, Figma, Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, Miro, InVision, Canva
Group project dedicated to redesign the New York Public Library site to be more usable and more streamlined.
A survey was created and multiple one-on-one interviews were executed. We executed a heuristic evaluation of the website and did competitor analysis of four other websites, two of which were also libraries. First of all, we created a proto persona based on our assumptions about who would use library services regularly. He is a student and likes to read, and his main goal is to find many resources for his study within his budget.
We conducted one on one interviews to get to know about our users in terms of their purpose of visiting the library website and any possible pain points they face. We recorded the process and gathered notes under a Google sheet. We also created an online survey to reach out to more users, where we were able to gather responses from 11 different users.
After we conducted interviews and a survey, we collected results in sticky notes on Miro Board and created an Affinity Diagram to see the area of improvement we could focus on in this project.
We decided to demonstrate a user flow of getting a library card. We Considered this task is crucial because users need to get a library card to have full access to the library service both online and offline.
After all the research and analysis, we created a value proposition statement and canvas which demonstrates unique values we can provide to our users by our redesign.
A low-fi design was done on paper and then passed through a review prior to moving forward to mid-fi on Figma. Our mid fidelity prototype was tested and iterated using the guerrilla testing method. With the feedback gathered during the first phase of testing we were finally ready to design our hi-fidelity prototype. This prototype also went through one more round of testing to ensure we had arrived at our final design which was ready for front-end development.
In summary, we made the NewYork Public Library’s website more user friendly by making a handful of changes to how the site is laid out and how the information is organized.
Through our research process,we learned what potential users are looking for from the site and we determine what users find jarring and frustrating about the current site.
Based on that, we narrowed down what our main problems were and how to solve them. Our key changes were overhauling the site’s navigation system, adding a visible carousel with key information, and having more book recommendations on the main page.
For further work, we're planning to execute more high-fidelity user tests to refine the layout and to flesh out all pages of the website. We’ve come up with new features, such as a live chat button and an algorithm to recommend content, to add more value for the users.
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