Gathering Customer Input Prior to Home Page Redesign: An Ontological Study

In the summer of 2001, the Library's Content Team, which addresses the selection of content in the Library's Web site, studied how clients organize and describe information. Specifically, we wanted to identify which library resources and services were considered to be most important by our clients, how clients would organize the library's electronic resources and services, and the terminology clients would use to describe their groupings. The results will be used in the redesign of the library's home page. This poster presents our library's experience in planning and conducting this study, which involved a multi-level card sort. We will report on the process we developed to guide us through this study, from setting our initial goals to analyzing the data. We will present our card sort methodology as well as the participant-selection process, which involved the use of our client contact database and other unique approaches to encouraging participation by self-selected volunteers. We will share our detailed working procedures, such as the development of a shared calendar to manage scheduling and a participant database to track responses. Finally, we will present our analysis methods for the gathered data and identify the resources necessary to complete this type of study successfully.