By Kelli Anne Gecawich & Justin Barnett
The Technology Checkout page is one of the most frequently visited on the Georgia Southern Libraries website. It has information on what equipment is available for the university community to check out, types of equipment available, checkout policies, and more helpful information on what technology the Libraries can offer to aid in student success. Much of this information is not available in the catalog, so this is the primary source for patrons to learn about our offerings.
During the 2022-2023 school year, this webpage needed a makeover. It did not best represent the equipment available at Georgia Southern Libraries, could be confusing at times as it spread over several related LibGuides, and relied heavily on text. We needed to redesign it to provide a better user experience and more accurately represent the Georgia Southern Libraries. Initial meetings with our circulation staff and faculty helped determine what content we wanted to present to patrons, and we did some preliminary research of other institutions’ technology checkout websites to get some ideas on effective ways to restructure. (We drew inspiration from Clemson, East Carolina & UNC-Charlotte in particular.)
When it came to redesigning the guide, we wanted to focus on the following things:
- Less text and more visuals, including graphic navigation
- Making the guide more intuitive and easy to navigate
- Standardizing the presentation of information
- Limiting user clicks/page reloads
- Designing for accessibility
Instead of simply making small changes, we performed a complete overhaul, starting over to create a new product. Gone were the heavy walls of text and the long side navigation menus with too many subpages. We chose to limit the number of visible pages in favor of using graphics-based landing pages as menus, with each button opening a modal window that presents the information without another page load. As part of this, we made sure to keep screen-reader accessibility in mind and focused on consistency in our information display; we never wanted patrons unsure of where to find relevant information between one item and the next. The emphasis on graphics and limiting the text displayed initially was to avoid overwhelming users with unnecessary information until they narrowed in on what they needed. Some of our design choices – such as the modal windows – required custom code not previously available in LibGuides, and are now available to any of our guide creators, even outside of the technology checkout guide in particular.
We would also like to extend our appreciation to our many colleagues that participated in our informal focus groups to help ensure that everything was navigable, made sense to users, and accurately represented Georgia Southern Libraries. In the future, we are hoping to integrate the guide with our learning management system (LMS) to provide real-time updates on what checkout equipment is available at each campus location.
Questions? Contact Justin Barnett at jbarnett@georgiasouthern.edu and Kelli Anne Gecawich at kgecawich@georgiasouthern.edu.
To learn more about the Georgia Southern Libraries, go to https://library.georgiasouthern.edu/.