A Library Website Redesign in the Time of COVID: A Chronological Case Study COMMUNICATION A Library Website Redesign in the Time of COVID A Chronological Case Study Erin Rushton and Bern Mulligan INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | DECEMBER 2022 https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v41i4.15101 Erin Rushton (erushton@binghamton.edu) is Head of Digital Initiatives and Resource Discovery, Binghamton University Libraries. Bern Mulligan (mulligan@binghamton.edu) is Associate Librarian Emeritus, Binghamton University Libraries. © 2022. He found a glimmer of hope in the ruins of disaster…. Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera ABSTRACT In November 2019, Binghamton University Libraries initiated a website redesign project. Our goal was to create a user-centered, data-informed website with refreshed content and upgraded functionality. Originally, our redesign plan included in-person card-sorting activities, focus groups, and usability studies, but when the Libraries went remote in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to quickly reassess and adapt our processes and workflows. In this article, we will discuss how we completed this significant project remotely by relying on effective project management, communication, teamwork, and flexibility. INTRODUCTION Website redesign projects can be daunting, even during normal circumstances. This article will outline how we accomplished a website redesign project in a reasonable timeframe during the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Binghamton University is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Founded in 1946, it has an enrollment of about 18,000 graduate and undergraduate students. Binghamton University Libraries are an important part of the University, serving as the center of the University’s intellectual community. Our website is the Libraries’ most important tool for “scaling up” services to our users. It is as important as the physical library and became even more so with the digital demands imposed by COVID, particularly the importance of access to streaming video during the pandemic. A truism in website redesign is that your current website is never more popular than when you take it down. However, our redesigned website was successfully launched to general approbation and is considered a functional and cosmetic improvement over the old website. We were pleasantly surprised how little negative feedback we received. People just started using it, which may be the highest compliment paid to a design team. As we will highlight throughout the article, we believe that the success of this project was the result of the following: • A dedicated/functional web team, • The ability to meet frequently and on a moment’s notice, • The ability to focus almost exclusively on the project; and • Effective project management. mailto:erushton@binghamton.edu_ mailto:mulligan@binghamton.edu INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 2 PREMISE FOR THE REDESIGN The last time the Libraries had fully redesigned the website was in 2013. That project was significant because we had migrated from a locally hosted site to the University’s web content management system, OmniUpdate. Highlights of the 2013 redesign included a fresh look and feel with Binghamton University colors, updated site architecture and navigation, and expanded search options from the home page. Up until 2013, we had typically redesigned our website on a five-year cycle. As such, we began discussing the possibility of another redesign in mid-2018. We also thought it was an opportune time to redesign the website because the Libraries had a new dean, we were offering new services and initiatives, and we had become more mindful of accessibility issues and responsive design. THE WEB TEAM The Libraries’ web team is the group that leads website redesign projects and maintains the website. The team generally meets as needed between redesign projects. In anticipation of the planned 2019–2020 redesign, however, we began scheduling more regular meetings. Our preferred meeting times were Friday mornings. One of the prerequisites for these meetings was to take turns bringing bagels and juice. We quickly got to know what kind of bagel each of us preferred. In November 2019, the team consisted of Ben Coury, Bern Mulligan, Erin Rushton (chair), and Dave Vose. Except for Ben, the other members of the web team had participated in several past library website redesigns. Ben had recently been hired as the Libraries’ digital web designer. He brought high-end programming skills to the team and expertise and knowledge about user experience and accessibility which were integral to the success of the project. It was an advantage to have a small, dedicated, and agile team that collaborated and communicated well. This positive chemistry or esprit de corps among members allowed us to debate any controversial issues professionally, not personally. We internalized the team’s mission and worked single-mindedly toward its successful completion. Binghamton University is a Google campus, which meant we had access to the full suite of Google Apps (e.g., Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Groups, etc.). At the beginning of the redesign, we had already begun to use Google to create, share, and archive our committee documents. PROJECT TIMELINE This is the timeline for the project, which took ten months to complete. It occurred basically in two phases: before COVID and after COVID. Much of the work that occurred before COVID was completed in person. All of what occurred after COVID was done virtually: via email, phone, and, as was the case with most organizations during the pandemic, via Zoom. • November 2019: planning phase • December 2019–March 11, 2020: in-person meetings with library constituent groups • March 12, 2020: meeting with student advisory group • March 17, 2020: COVID shutdown • April 15, 2020: meeting with Communications and Marketing INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 3 • April–June 2020: website architecture and content review • July 2020: creating templates, migrating content, and designing the home page • August 2020: final meetings and details • August 19, 2020: successful launch of the new website When planning a website redesign project, it is understood that there will be a lot of meetings. As the pace of the project accelerates and as the deadline approaches, so does the frequency of meetings. During the ten months of this project, we met 64 times: 16 in-person meetings from November 2012 to March 12, 2020; 25 virtual meetings from March 17 to the end of June; and 23 virtual meetings in July and August. During July and August until launch, the other aspects of our jobs took a back seat to the proj ect; it’s pretty much all we worked on. We sometimes met twice a day, and that’s not counting the incidental phone calls between individual members for questions about sticking points in the process. November 2019: Planning Phase The Libraries’ User Interface Steering Committee (UISC) has oversight for the various public library interfaces, including the website. The committee consists of the web team members and representatives from different departments in the Libraries, including Public Services, Technic al Services, and Special Collections. The UISC helped us establish the goals and objectives for the redesign project, gave us feedback about ideas during the redesign process, and monitored our ongoing progress. There were four goals that became apparent almost immediately. Over the years, many website development requests had been postponed, so our first goal was to accommodate these improvements and enhancements. And since University Communications and Marketing, the unit on campus responsible for the entire University web domain, had updated templates since our last redesign, our second goal was to utilize the new templates. Our third goal was to create a user- centered, data-informed website. Finally, our fourth goal was to address accessibility issues on the website and make it easier for users to navigate. December 2019–March 11, 2020: In-Person Meetings with Library Constituent Groups Once the goals had been established, we began scheduling meetings with a variety of library constituent groups. These included Preservation, Reader Services, Special Collections, and Dean’s Council. It was important for us to get input from these groups because we wanted everyone to feel represented by the project since the website is the gateway for many of our services and resources. We also wanted the redesign process to be transparent so that everyone knew what was happening. At each meeting, we discussed how the website was working for their area and what improvements they wanted to see. We also provided a snapshot of the website for each area which showed current usage statistics (see fig. 1). INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 4 Figure 1. Screenshot of a website inventory spreadsheet for Special Collections. March 12, 2020: Meeting with Student Advisory Group We met with the Student Library Advisory Committee (SLAC) on March 12. This group offered open, two-way communication between the Libraries and the student population and provided a mechanism for the Libraries to solicit feedback on specific issues as needed. As an incentive for students attending this meeting, we provided free pizza and snacks. At this meeting, we asked the students a variety of questions, including why they used the website and what they liked and disliked about it. Some of the answers we received were surprising to us. For one thing, few of the students began their research from our website. While they had used the website, they were not particularly familiar with most of its features. A second consensus of the group was that if they wanted to know something about the Libraries (e.g., our hours), they just Googled it. Finally, although our Ask a Librarian service was linked from several places on the website, none of the students in the group had ever noticed it and were unaware of the service. These revelations further informed what we wanted to address in the redesign. March 17, 2020: COVID Shutdown On March 17, the University abruptly closed in-person services due to the growing pandemic. For a few weeks after the shutdown, the priority for all University employees was transitioning to remote work and providing virtual services. Once we felt ready to resume the project, we had to reassess how we would continue it remotely. There were two significant challenges: how to continue our committee work as a distributed team and how to continue gathering user feedback given that no one was physically on campus. We discovered that transitioning into a distributed team worked well for the project. We no longer had to reserve meeting spaces and set up laptops and projectors. Instead, we could quickly organize Zoom meetings, sometimes on the fly, when we had something we wanted to discuss. And all our committee files were already on Google Drive. As a result, we were better able to focus almost exclusively on the project and were less impacted by the distractions that often occur in the office environment. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 5 Unfortunately, we were unable to conduct any of the focus groups with teaching faculty or the “guerrilla” usability testing with students that we had planned. However, we were glad to have had the in-person meetings with some of our constituents before the work-from-home phase because we had established a good foundation of what we needed to accomplish in the redesign. April 15, 2020: Meeting with Communications and Marketing One of the first groups we met with virtually was University Communications and Marketing (C&M). As mentioned above, this is the unit on campus that is responsible for OmniUpdate, the University’s website platform. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss our plans and timeline and to clarify the role of C&M in the project. Although we now had our own web designer in Ben, we knew that C&M had oversight over the entire University web presence and would have to decide whether our redesign fit in with the rest of the domain in terms of its appearance and accessibility. April-June 2020: Website Architecture and Content Review The next significant part of the project was reviewing our current pages. During preliminary planning the year before, we had a student list all pages of the Libraries’ website in a Google spreadsheet which also included Google Analytics from the three previous years. We literally spent hours poring over this document (see fig. 2). It helped us identify which pages would migrate mostly as is, which pages would need additional review, which pages would be converted to LibGuides and vice versa, and which pages would be deleted. Figure 2. Screenshot of a spreadsheet listing all library web pages. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 6 Originally, we had planned to do a physical card sorting like we had done in past redesigns. We had even created the cards and had scheduled an all-day card-sorting event, complete with pizza. But COVID changed all that. Since we were meeting virtually, we had to think of another way to accomplish this. A breakthrough occurred when Ben introduced Trello, an online collaboration and project management tool that allowed us to work together on the new website’s architecture in real time via Zoom (see fig. 3). Figure 3. Screenshot of a Trello board. We recreated the six existing main navigation categories and created “cards” for each web page. Trello made it easy to move these virtual cards around into the different categories. We had received feedback that six categories were perhaps too many for users to choose from. We spent a number of meetings in May discussing/debating what the new navigation categories should be and where pages fit under them. We decided to fold the Locations & Collections and Special Collections sections into About, and Search & Find into Research, because we felt these changes made more logical and functional sense. We added a top-level link to My Account because this was also something that users had suggested should be more prominent. Another aspect of the Libraries’ website redesign project was the content of LibGuides. Initially, they were meant to be subject guides, but over the years some of our web pages were converted into LibGuides. As part of the redesign, we worked closely with the Collections and Instruction department to make decisions about where content should be located. Most LibGuides are now subject or research guides while descriptions of Libraries’ services are web pages. July 2020: Creating Templates, Migrating Content, and Designing the Home Page By the end of June, we had accomplished the following: • Met with available constituencies, • Identified what content we needed to migrate, • Identified what content needed to be created; and • Had a new website architecture. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 7 At this point, we felt we needed to focus on the actual migration of content and the design of the home page. On July 2, we met virtually with Collections and Instruction to discuss how the search box on the home page would look and function. It was no mean feat coming to consensus on this. We were on a tight schedule, but we wanted to be sure that we heard everyone’s ideas. Taking all feedback into consideration, Ben then had the ultimate challenge of coding and designing a functioning search box. For the last three weeks of July, we met daily, and sometimes twice a day, as we began the daunting process of migrating all the lower-level pages. We were definitely feeling the pressure to complete the project on time. Since we were using the new University templates, designing the lower-level pages was relatively straightforward. Ben had customized the template and provided us with a migration guide. The guide included instructions on how to create and format new pages. This allowed the other members of the web team to migrate content while he focused on the more complicated aspects of the project. All migrated content was reviewed to ensure that it was current. For some pages, this required input from several departments. To facilitate the updating, we copied the content of every page we were migrating into a Google Doc to allow for collaborative editing. Once the content was updated, it would be copied and pasted into the new template. The screenshot in figure 4 represents the redesign for most of the lower-level pages. Figure 4. Screenshot of a new lower-level page. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 8 The most significant changes were the relocation of the navigation column from left to right and some new features that were included in OmniUpdate, including the ability to add contact information. We had to do some formatting, such as adding headings and hyperlinks, and some metadata work, such as creating page descriptions and keywords. We also had to pick a photo for the banner of each page. We had planned to have the University photographer take new photos, but because there were no students and hardly any staff on campus, we had to rely on pictures of our spaces he had already taken. We were tracking the migration on a spreadsheet (see fig. 5). This document contained the new architecture of the website and had links to the Google Docs mentioned previously. The spreadsheet also noted who was responsible for reviewing the content and the status of each page. Figure 5. Screenshot of the spreadsheet used to track the migration of webpages. While this mass migration was taking place, Ben focused on creating the pages that required additional coding and customization such as the Ask a Librarian page, the staff directory, and library tutorials. He also worked on the design of the home page. One of the tools Ben used to help with the mock-up was Adobe XD (see fig. 6). INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 9 Figure 6. Screenshot of initial design of home page in Adobe XD. Adobe XD is a design tool in the Adobe suite used for prototyping user interfaces. He created an interactive wireframe for the home page and landing pages. This allowed us to discuss the interface and make changes without a lot of time spent on mock-ups. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 10 August 2020: Final Meetings and Details We met with the User Interface Steering Committee on August 5 to get their input on the redesign. On August 7, we met with Communications and Marketing again to go over our design and get final approval for our home page. We also previewed the site to library people at an all-staff meeting later that day. The final week before site launch was dedicated to the Special Collections pages that had embedded links for finding aids and to working on the Ask a Librarian page. And the last day was spent going through and making sure everything was in order before launch. August 19, 2020: Successful Launch of the New Website We launched the redesigned website on August 19 (see fig. 7). Some of its new features include • A large “hero” photo which can easily be changed depending on what the Libraries want to promote; • A redesigned search box; • Popular links featured on the home page; • A news section which pulls from our blog software and allows for automatic updates; and • A prominent, visually attractive place on the home page for Special Collections since it was bumped from the top navigation bar. Figure 7. Partial screenshot of the new library home page. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES DECEMBER 2022 A LIBRARY WEBSITE REDESIGN IN THE TIME OF COVID | RUSHTON AND MULLIGAN 11 CONCLUSION The process that we had initially envisioned did not work out because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although we did meet with our student advisory group, we never got to hold any focus groups with teaching faculty or usability studies with students. But thanks to Zoom and other online tools, we were still able to gather some user feedback. We also had a new website ready before fall 2020. While there was certainly unanticipated stress in tackling a project like this in the middle of a pandemic, we felt that working remotely in some ways helped us to be more productive. We were better able to focus almost exclusively on this project and were less impacted by the distractions that often occur in the office environment. We also felt that the quick adoption of Zoom made us more agile about scheduling and holding meetings. Despite some of the challenges that we faced throughout the project, the redesigned website is a success. Since the launch, we have made a few minor changes to the overall architecture of the site. The most significant change was adding a Giving link to the navigation menu at the req uest of our dean and the Binghamton University Foundation. Our library website is never static, as we continue to update our home page with news and events and change our hero banner to reflect the priorities of the Libraries. While we have no plans for another major redesign in the near future, we are open to making changes and improvements as needed. BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Danielle A., and Lauren Yannotta. “Modeling a Library Web Site Redesign Process: Developing a User-Centered Web Site Through Usability Testing.” Information Technology and Libraries 32, no. 1 (2013): 6–22. Buell, Jesi, and Mark Sandford. “From Dreamweaver to Drupal: A University Library Website Case Study.” Information Technology and Libraries 37, no. 2 (2018): 118–26. Wu, Jin, and Janis F. Brown. “Website Redesign: A Case Study.” Medical Reference Services Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2016): 158–74. Zhu, Candice. “Website Makeover: Transforming the User Experience Starting from Scratch.” Computers in Libraries 41, no. 6 (2021): 21–6. ABSTRACT Introduction Premise for the Redesign The Web Team Project Timeline November 2019: Planning Phase December 2019–March 11, 2020: In-Person Meetings with Library Constituent Groups March 12, 2020: Meeting with Student Advisory Group March 17, 2020: COVID Shutdown April 15, 2020: Meeting with Communications and Marketing April-June 2020: Website Architecture and Content Review July 2020: Creating Templates, Migrating Content, and Designing the Home Page August 2020: Final Meetings and Details August 19, 2020: Successful Launch of the New Website Conclusion Bibliography