It’s been a while since I’ve done much writing. I’m not sure how people do it.

I’ve spent the last few months at San Jose Public Library working on a website redesign (among other things). It isn’t until I find myself at home on a rainy day with a cold that I feel like I have the perspective to put a few thoughts out there that might be relevant to PLA blog readers. Right now my boss, the Amazingly Informed one, is at Computers in Libraries talking about our redesign process at SJPL. Here’s what I’ve got on my mind as we move forward.

As we put together our new homepage, the principles of user-centered design guided the process. The whole way through we were trying to get inside of the library users’ heads to think of how they would interact with our site to find what they need. Right now, the page is being tested by a diverse group of users and the results of those tests will inform any tweaks or changes we need to make. In the end, we will have a website that library patrons will be able to navigate as naturally as the dashboard of a car, the control panel of their stove, the hot and cold water faucets in their bathroom.

That is super for our library patrons, but there is another step in the design process we have to consider. Our intention is to configure the site as a framework or a skeleton to display content written by San Jose Public Library staff. An old-style website would stop with the process I described in the former paragraph. We’d lay out a good structure and ‘look-and-feel’ for the site, figure out the content, and optimize everything so users can find their way around easily. With our new Drupal site, we have another set of users to consider and another set of design constraints. This is another type of user-centered design: content-provider centered design.

If you’ve published anything to the web with ease, you’ve benefited from quality content-provider centered design. Check out the image above, this is the back-end of me writing this very blog post. When you write a post on WordPress, you use a wyswig text editor, so that typing your blog post is as easy as writing a document in a word processor. If it weren’t for that editor, you’d be typing HTML, CSS, and who knows what else. These are the kinds of considerations we have to take when designing not only for the end users but content creators as well. The wysiwig editor is an obvious example, but what of layout questions? Intuitive menu options? Simple things like offering previews of posts before content is published? We’ve got hundreds of individuals scattered across the city of San Jose who are going to be keeping the stories on our website fresh, new, and exciting and as the designers it is our job to make that easy for them.

There’s a lot more to a library website redesign than meets the eye. End-user usability testing is only the first phase of testing for a dynamic, large scale website involving so many authors. After our initial website ‘skin’ is done, we will begin to work with all of our library staff to make it an excellent publishing platform for them.