West Point unveiled its new library building in the 2008 school year. They wanted their online library site to be a fitting showcase for the new facilities - and to approach library services in a new way.

Challenges

TCS provided a functional and presentational makeover of this university library website based on a broad set of needs.

• Identify primary audiences (Student Cadets, Faculty, Library Administrators and Visitors) and their workflows
• Simplify navigation and information structure, with an eye towards end-user needs
• Enable and support Student and Faculty "self-service"
• Define administration and maintenance tools for the Library Staff
• Supply the project team with process tools, documentation and guidance in a "virtual" working environment

Solutions

Provided a clickable site model that conformed to the workflow, allowed stakeholders to sign-off on the experience, and served as design guide for the development team.

We brought the most-used features to the forefront and integrated tools that would allow Library Administrators to easily customize outreach to target audience groups.

We made the online Reference Desk the site's focal point for access to library resources.

We allowed Faculty to connect their course syllabus directly to Library holdings and search tools so that Student Cadets could self-service quickly and easily.

Design Specifications, Demo Site, Wireframes, Personas (Stakeholder Profiles), CSS Style Guide, Information Architecture, Sitemap

This one was a real "information architecture and retrieval" challenge.

Probably the biggest solution was to provide all users with a topic-centric view of available resources. In the legacy site, information was often "silo-ed" by storage medium or organizational boundaries, which meant that you had to search repeatedly and redundantly to find the information you want.

Educational Customer Self-service, Information Retrieval site model & page templates, & sitemap, CSS stylesheets & information architecture, business requirements, functional specifications & best practices documentation, taxonomy, administration & maintenance, telecommute