State Library of South Australia: Elevating the user experience
The State Library of South Australia asked us to research their customers' needs and design a new user experience for a modern, engaging and accessible Drupal website.
- Client
- State Library of South Australia
- Service types
- Content Strategy
The solutions
Optimising for the top tasks
Discovery: Workshops, alignment and discussion
While there's a lot to do and see at the State Library of South Australia, a key takeaway from the discovery workshop was that visitors were typically interested in:
- Events, exhibitions or tours
- Learning programs and workshops
- Seeing the collections in person
This was an interesting insight as while the workshop participants agreed that these were the Library's core attractions, they weren't apparent in the existing website navigation. Another interesting takeaway was that while customers see events, exhibitions and tours as similar things, they were only treated separately throughout the website because of the departments responsible for facilitating them.
What was clear was that in order to optimise for these top tasks and be in line with our visitors’ expectations, we had to reorganise and simplify not only the navigation, but also some of the content.
Making the most of the opportunity
Advocating for a cleaner, more conventional navigation was critical in helping visitors find the right content. But once they were there, we had to make sure we were delivering what they expected to find.
Designing a flexible and dynamic template
When we analysed content types, we found significant overlap not only among events, exhibitions, and tours but also between learning programs and workshops. For example, they all had descriptions, dates and times, special requirements, a primary call-to-action (such as making a booking), and often imagery or videos to help generate interest and provide more context.
As a result, we were able to focus on a more dynamic design that catered to a broader set of requirements. While it front-loaded some extra design and discovery effort, it saved a lot on development effort and helped content authors by providing consistency. As this was identified early, we were able to make each experience feel distinct for website visitors.
The Collections
Seeing the Collections was a big part of the library experience. With a focus on 'South Australiana', the Library's Collection is extensive, ranging from photographs of the World Wars to journals, posters, films, newspapers, transcripts, and even oral histories.
In the legacy website, if you knew what you were looking for, the items were catalogued in both the Library's online catalogue and the Digital Collections platform, an online showcase of selected items from the Library's collection.
The biggest opportunity identified was awareness: people just didn't know what to look for.
The goal wasn't for the website to showcase everything. Instead, its purpose was to provide a context for what the Collections are about, giving visitors a starting point from which to explore the collection in person (or to browse the digital collection).
The results
While the legacy website did have a lot of content that visitors found helpful, it wasn't organised or presented in the way visitors expected. This presented the most compelling opportunity for the team to rally around because, while it was important for us to ensure the look and feel was modernised, it was more critical that we established a clear and consistent user experience.