St. Charles Public Library

Overview

St. Charles Public Library staff were constantly fielding calls from patrons struggling to use their website. It needed a user experience update. The organization tied this work to a larger website overhaul, which included adopting a new CMS and sophisticated visual brand.

I lead the Glantz redesign and development team as creative director and owned the site’s information architecture.

Process

Designing for — everyone?

Libraries are for everyone. The website had an exceedingly broad audience: teenagers, professional researchers, unemployed adults, and parents on behalf of young children, to name a few.

I used stakeholder interviews to gain an early understanding of the library website’s users and their needs. Representatives from each department — adult services, youth services, circulation, technology services, and research — provided insight into their patrons and highlighted their challenges.

Using the borrower’s logic

“I can’t find what I’m looking for” was a universal struggle across all audiences. My content audit highlighted three issues contributing to their pain:

1. About one-third of the pages were uncategorized children of the home page.

2. Important pages were not included in the navigation. They were only findable via site search or inline links.

3. Navigation categories and page titles used language that made sense to library employees, but not library patrons.

I created a new information architecture to address these issues. Approachable language replaced the jargon, and the categories were reprioritized based on borrower’s needs. The main navigation promotes common tasks and deprioritizes administrative information.

A field trip for visual inspiration

The library opened a brand new facility just before the website project began. I seized the opportunity to draw visual design inspiration from the building’s architecture and interior design.

I led my design team on a trip to the St. Charles library, where we an afternoon observing and experiencing the space. Its colors, patterns, and textures informed our design concepts. The library’s website matches the look and feel of its physical space, creating a seamless and unified patron experience.