Different colors of sticky notes with text on them
Type
Research
Status
Current
Project Contributors
  • Austin Deneau
  • Sruthin Gaddam
  • Shelby Kroske
  • Marochelle Moreno
  • Shel Vilag

InterLibrary Services Website Redesign

Project Description

At its core, InterLibrary Services (ILS) offers options for the MSU community to borrow items from other institutions. The current ILS website can be confusing for those who interact with it. We are working to redesign the ILS website to reduce areas of confusion, clarify what ILS can do for library patrons, and make it easier for them to use ILS services.

Research Method

For this project we utilized user interviews as our primary research method. A user interview is an attitudinal research technique which enables the researcher to gain insights into a user's thoughts and feelings. These can be structured or semi-structured; for our project we used the semi-structured interview format where allowed a free flow of conversation after a pre-scripted interview question.

Project Purpose

The ILS team requested an overhaul of their webpages on the main library site, as the current layout presented some challenges for users.

Work Completed

We interviewed the first set of users who interact with ILS regularly. This group included staff and faculty members at the Library who work closely with the ILS unit, and we interviewed them to gain an understanding of how they view ILS.

These user interviews shed light on various pain points users encounter when using the ILS website. These include:

  • Content
    • ILS homepage defaults to items owned @MSU
    • What does ILS want patrons to see first; what do we want to draw peoples’ eyes to?
  • FAQs
    • Accordion style display of the FAQ makes it hard to access the contents.
    • The organization and order of the FAQs is not clear
  • Get it Button
    • The term “Get It” is not clear.
  • Illiad
    • Illiad is among the most used feature but does not stand out enough in the sidebar.
    • Terminology is not explained/understood well.
  • Navigation
    • There is confusion between ILL and ILS and what those mean.
    • “ILS” and “InterLibrary Services” is unclear, especially on gray tab and in the main navigation of the library site
    • Patrons are using search to find the ILS pages.
  • Policies
    • It is unclear what policies apply to who and to what situations.
  • Process
    • Patrons perhaps don’t know what they are looking at when it comes to Illiad account
    • Patrons don’t know what to expect of the ILL/ILS process. It is not clearly displayed on the site.
    • Accessing Illiad requests is a challenge.
  • Service Knowledge
    • Patrons aren’t aware that ILS exists or the services they offer.
    • Staff is sometimes unsure what services ILS offers or the processes.
  • Unclear Terminology
    • Patrons do not understand terminology surrounding ILS, including the ILS abbreviation, UBorrow, and WorldCat.
  • Unit Interaction
    • Staff cannot see what is on the patron’s ILLiad account to answer questions.
    • Hard for staff to efficiently describe steps to get to and use ILS over phone and chat.

Based on the findings we identified a set of solutions to address each pain point.

Upcoming work

We are planning to conduct more user interviews with two additional groups of users; We will be interviewing patrons who use ILS to check out items, as well as staff members within the ILS unit at the library.