Turfgrass Information Center
As Drupal 7 is approaching its end of life, the User Experience team will be closely working with the Turfgrass Information Center to redo their website. The Turfgrass Information Center houses the most comprehensive publicly-available collection of turfgrass research and educational materials in the world, and has also continuously produced the Turfgrass Information File (TGIF) database since 1983. The TGIF database contains more than a quarter million records, with over 60% of those records linking the user directly to the full-text of the item. The Turfgrass Information Center and TGIF database are irreplaceable resources for students, researchers, and professionals around the world who are responsible for maintaining golf courses, lawns, athletic fields, and managed landscapes of every kind, helping fulfill MSU’s land-grant ideal.
The User Experience team worked closely with the Turfgrass Information Center to redesign their website. Our objective was to significantly enhance the user experience by delivering a more intuitive and cohesive design for various search interfaces available on the Turfgrass website. We prioritized responsive design to ensure usability across a wide range of devices, including smartphones and tablets, while also advancing the site’s accessibility to meet the needs of all users. In parallel, we wanted to modernize the underlying technical infrastructure, adopting contemporary technologies to align with current design and development standards. This project was driven by an urgent need to transition from Drupal 7, which was approaching its end-of-life in January 2025, adding a critical time constraint to the project.
Design Process
We used the same color palette, iconography, button styling, and font family as we used for lib.msu.edu to ensure visual consistency between the two MSU Libraries sites while working to modernize the look and feel. We also used many of the same structural components as the MSU Libraries main website, such as the header and main navigation, for cohesion in user experience. Much of the design work came in the form of creating improved user task flows, page layouts, and user interactions for the various features of the TIC interface, such as the Thesaurus Search, to meet our high standards for accessibility and enhance the overall user experience. We also focused on ensuring the interface looked and functioned well on all device types, often meaning slightly different UI depending on screen size.
Development and Launch
Our development journey began with the development of a robust application stack, leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Traefik, a reverse proxy server that streamlined URL routing and fortified our defenses against numerous bot attacks targeting the Turfgrass Information Center (TIC) website. This new stack marked a significant improvement over previous years, enabling seamless sharing of the same code base across developer, test, and production instances.
With the foundation firmly established, our primary focus shifted to building the search interfaces that interact with the STAR backend database used by TIC. Collaborating closely with the TIC unit, we meticulously designed and implemented the Basic, Power, Guided, and Thesaurus searches on the new website. Notably, the Power and Guided searches underwent substantial upgrades, offering users the ability to add, remove, and group search terms dynamically. The result selection functionality also saw significant enhancements, with dynamic updates to the count of selected results and accurate retrieval from the backend database when switching between search types.
Ensuring the alignment of desktop and mobile versions with the designers' vision was crucial. This effort guaranteed that the TIC site was not only functional and user-friendly but also aesthetically pleasing across all devices—desktop, tablet, and mobile. Overcoming the challenge of presenting TIC information on smaller screens involved close collaboration with Andrew and Elizabeth, ensuring the final product met their expectations.
As we approached the launch of the new TIC website, our team developed a tracking spreadsheet to track and migrate approximately 240 Drupal pages from the old site to the new one. We strategically divided the pages by content type and tackled the migration collaboratively. Most pages found their new home on the revamped TIC website, while some were relocated to the Intranet for internal staff use. This meticulous migration ensured a seamless transition and maintained the integrity of the content.
The new TIC website was successfully launched on January 6th, 2025, marking a milestone with the introduction of analytics for the first time. These analytics provide valuable insights into site usage, popular searches, and the devices our users employ. In the first five months, the site garnered 10,416 visits, 79,853 page views, and 38,696 unique page views. Additionally, we received unsolicited praise from the USGA, who remarked, "Hadn't been to TGIF in a while, new website looks great, and behaves well! Nice work."
UX Testing
With the successful launch of our new TIC website, we are now focusing on UX testing to ensure optimal user experience. Our strategy involves collaborating closely with classes on campus that utilize search interfaces. The TIC unit will introduce us to these classes, and we plan to work with them throughout Fall 2025 to identify areas for improvement. By recruiting students for User Journey Mapping UX activities, we aim to closely monitor and document their experiences. This will enable our team to pinpoint and analyze any pain points in the search functionality, ensuring continuous enhancement of the user experience.
Accessibility Testing
Our team meticulously documented the usage of various search interfaces on the new Turfgrass Information Center (TIC) website. These comprehensive notes were then handed over to students from the Accessibility unit. The students conducted thorough testing of the search interfaces using WAVE, an accessibility web page evaluation browser plugin, to identify any accessibility issues. Their detailed findings were relayed back to our team, and we are committed to addressing these issues throughout the Summer and Fall of 2025.
Next steps
Another significant project in our portfolio is the successful indexing of all data from the STAR database into Solr, an open-source searching and indexing system. A few years ago, our team developed a prototype using a smaller dataset. Building on this foundation, our plan is to expand the prototype into a fully featured application capable of indexing hundreds of thousands of records from the STAR database into Solr. This ambitious endeavor will enable us to enhance the search functionality by incorporating advanced features such as autocomplete and faceting, thereby improving overall efficiency and user experience.