As I mentioned in last month’s post, I’ve been working on a new website for the Boston Public Library.

I am happy to say that the website is now live!

Some of the website looks a bit different from when I showed it to you all just four weeks ago. We changed the name of some of our top navigation labels, and we changed some of the groupings in the navigation elements after we did some initial user testing.

We were able to test with a variety of ages and groups of people, including visually impaired users, and seniors from Boston. After we did this testing, we realized people were not connecting with the “collections” label we had, so we changed it to “Books & More.” We also noticed that people were getting a little lost in the navigation items within “collections” and “services” so we did some card sorting with staff members and members of the public and reorganized them with groupings that made sense. With each of these changes we did some A/B testing to make sure these changes were for the better.

While not everything on the website is perfect, we will continue to work on making the website better based on feedback and additional testing.

If you would like to provide feedback, you can fill out our feedback form. We now have an updated video tour, to reflect the navigational changes I mentioned, which can be viewed here.