Promoting the collections of an academic library

The University of Arizona Libraries

My Roles: UX researcher | UX designer

2024

Background

The Collection Services department at the University of Arizona Library came to the UX team with a challenge: they were worried that many of their carefully curated collections were going unnoticed by students.

These collections, titled “Recommended Collections”, were a mix of leisure reading, literature, culture, and history. They were specially curated not just for academic purposes, but to foster a culture of reading and exploration within the university community.

They asked us to identify ways to promote the collections, help users discover them, and encourage borrowing. I was assigned to work on this project.

Research Methods

  1. Survey: I distributed a survey to students across different ages, majors, and degree levels to gather quantitative data. Our goal was to learn about our users, estimate how many students were aware of these collections and how many used them.

  2. Competitive Analysis: I conducted a competitive analysis for five direct and indirect competitors to identify best practices and inspiration for promoting library collections.

  3. Comparative Analysis: I analyzed data on user interactions with these collections before and after implementing our design solution to evaluate its impact.

Constraints:

  1. The collections promoted in this project are overseen by one specific department, so It was not possible to make changes to the collections themselves or to the overall group we intended to highlight.

  2. We could not add new pages to the main library website.

  3. All collection pages had to remain within Primo, the library's discovery system. As a result, we were limited by Primo’s existing features and layout options.

Impact:

After conducting research and defining the main problems, I developed a solution that involved redesigning the library’s homepage. My design was implemented and displayed directly on the homepage, and we tracked user interactions with the collections for nearly a semester. The results showed a measurable and positive impact on the popularity of these collections.

Part of the University of Arizona Libraries’ homepage, redesigned to highlight library collections.