On 9/16/14, 7:15 PM, "Michael Schofield" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
>Q4. No nav?
>Okay, nobody actually brought this up, but users don¹t tend to look at
>sidebars at all. Most libraries have a top menu in the header. If this is
>the case, consider dropping sidebars entirely and positioning your single
>column of content with equal margins. Why? Well, white-space. People like
>white-space. Too much stuff on the page--stuff, by the way, people won't
>look at anyway--increases cognitive load, which might just put your
>patrons in a grumpy mood when looking for simple content. Also consider
>that libraries--like every industry--will eventually have their mobile
>moment. For some of us it might be pretty far away, but eventually mobile
>traffic will eclipse traditional desktop traffic (charts!
>http://talks.ns4lib.com/patrons-on-performance/images/mobile-web-usage.png
> and 
>http://talks.ns4lib.com/patrons-on-performance/images/mobilemoment.png ).
>
>Removing sidebar content also forces your design committee / content
>creators to think harder about the quality of their content and be a
>little bit more choosy about screen real estate.
>
>If you're interested in trying the no-sidebar thing, you may consider
>customizing the template so that the "side nav" appears as good old
>fashioned links at the top of your content, like--well--a table of
>contents. This isn't the best example, but it's an idea:
>http://public.library.nova.edu/help/#content.

On this front, our analytics repeatedly show that users do not use the nav
within libguides. They do not browse around between pages within the
guides. Most of the entries to secondary pages come from Google searches
using keywords directly related to their information. Non-search entry
points are only the ŒHome¹ (first) page of the guide and those come from
librarians showing the guide in instruction sessions or from the list of
guides displayed on our homepage[1].

Now, this could be because the nav in LG1 is terrible, tabs with
overlapping drop-downs are a horrible idea, and the design lends itself
more towards users ignoring the nav section than engaging with it. YMMV.
From other research we¹ve done, we know that our users are quick to
google, have pointed questions that demand pointed answers. They¹re not
much into exploring the breadth of information gathering techniques for
their discipline/topic (e.g. Someone looking for the registration
information for SciFinder isn¹t going to suddenly going to see the
ŒUndergraduate Labs¹ link and feel the need to check it out.).

[1] http://www.library.jhu.edu

-Sean