Web design and digital reference

Despite my best efforts to try to get regular postings here about chat, I'm finding myself more focussed in my library work lately on issues relating to web design. I am currently on a committee at my library to oversee the redesign of our library's web site. As you can see from my subscriptions to feeds in Bloglines, I'm paying a lot of attention these days to web design blogs. In fact, I follow nearly as many web design blogs as I do library blogs.

I've been thinking lately about how the topic of library web site design intersects with chat reference services. Here's some quick thoughts.

If your library is in a cooperative reference service, your library web site better be as up to date and informative as possible; if a librarian from another library in your cooperative is trying to help one of your patrons, that librarian has only your library web site (and maybe some cooperative documentation) to go on. You don't really have much of a right to complain about how your library's patrons are misinformed by coop librarians if your library web site is incomplete.

The link to the chat and e-mail service should be accessible from the home page. Our current library web site makes you click on the Ask a Librarian link just to get to a page where you then can click the chat button to get started. It would be ideal if that chat button and the e-mail button were available on the home page rather than on a separate page. From what I've been reading lately about the way most people navigate web sites, users typically click on a link on a home page that looks promising to them; if that link doesn't have what they want, then they click the back button (as opposed to the far more rare behavior of using the site's navigation to get to where they want to go). So if a patron clicks a link on your home page for "Reserves" thinking that the page will come up is going to allow them to place a hold on a book, that person will then click the back button to return to the home page, which is just where you'd want to have a prominent link to a live reference service that indicates, "Hey, we're here right now...we can help you...come on, click this link to chat with us now...really!"

If you've got a site with frames, redesign it...fast. One of the great things about digital reference is being able to send via e-mail or chat (on in a chat transcript) links to relevant web pages on your library site. If you've got a frame-based site, chances are those links will be to the navigational frame and not the specific page you really want the user to see. Our library site has got frames now; I can't wait to see them go.

You can learn a lot about the problems in the design of your library web site if you examine your chat transcripts and e-mail questions closely. There are, of course, many other ways to find out how your patrons are using or mis-using your library web site (surveys, focus groups, examine site statistics, etc.). But if you're already running a digital reference service, you've got evidence of where users haven't been able to figure things out for themselves.

It's great to have an icon or graphic for your chat service that jumps off the page and can't be missed by your users. As an example of a well-designed icon, see the Questions icon on the home page for the UCLA Library.