Work

Project Intro / Background

Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library (CCJPL) is a two-county system in northeast Arkansas with 8 branches that covers both a very rural part of the state, and Jonesboro, a university town. The library has an excellent genealogy service and photo digitization services that scans patrons' historic photos and adds them to their online collection. They have community building events like retro game nights and the usual story times and summer reading programs. They also have a love for animals, so they have aquariums and tanks, with one that houses their mascot, Norbert, a bearded dragon.

CCJPL wanted a site that had a vibrant personality with their minimal brand, which for Byte is a classic brand depth exercise. We worked to find just the right friendly-yet-expert feel, and then took this brand depth and let it flow throughout the rest of the site and features. Our job was to find the best design to make their content shine. We also spent a lot of time finding the right information density, one that showed just enough information to pique interest but not have visitors be overwhelmed. Kids and teens sections were also developed to be fun and interactive with their own theming, and show personality (and Norbert!) to multiple age groups.

Discovery

We find that every library we work with is unique and they represent their community best when we can showcase their voice and offerings. We start any public library discovery process by identifying their audiences and use cases, and it’s here that we find out what’s unique about the community’s needs. We iterate through every possible audience, including demographics-based audiences like teens and kids to affinity based audiences like book lovers and history buffs to needs-based like homebound patrons and job seekers. 

Once we identify the audiences and their needs, we identify content that exists or that needs to be created to fulfill all their needs. With that, we have a series of pages, sections and databases, we can now wrap that into a series of site maps, exploring themes and navigation-level narratives. We want to explore competitive themes in site mapping to find the most unique and relevant way to show the width and depth of the library. From there we wireframe the site to explore content density, order, and hierarchy.

Design

Since uniqueness and community value are vital, our design process is always custom and driven by the unique audiences and needs of the library. To achieve the best site possible, we created a series of competing designs based on different creative directions and presented them to CCJPL to have a great discussion on meaning and engagement. We then explored different screen sizes to create a fully responsive site, and include accessibility features, which include a full dark mode, low contrast and other visitor-chosen modes to make their experience the best possible.

We also wanted to connect with audiences better, so we designed kids and teens sections of the site, which included little activities or interactions for each group. The kids version included an animated bearded dragon that would snap up visitor-created insects, and the teens had various activities from sports to music to art.

Features

CCJPL wanted a fully functional, independent site so we have internal calendaring, events registrations, room reservations, book lists and an hours and locations explorer. We customized our library content management system to manage all these features, and connected their ILS to facilitate in book lists and other ILS connections.

Another new feature we wanted to explore was a Pathfinders system that would be a starting place for subjects like career advancement or lineage. Not only was there overview text about the library and how they help, each pathfinder page includes upcoming events, blog posts, book lists and other dynamic content based on the pathfinder tag. We have a closed taxonomy tagging system to keep things simple for visitors and content editors, and the pathfinder pages keep up to date just by using the tags.

Most libraries we meet don’t have a search strategy and many don’t even think about the audience’s search needs. Almost none of them have any sort of federated or universal search. When we work with libraries, we make good search a key focus, and we create a universal or bento-box search so people don’t immediately bounce out to the ILS to do a search which would have them miss events, book lists, etc. that are waiting for them on the main site. CCJPL’s search integrates BookSystems’ Atriuum product.

Results

Because of our unique process to bring out the library’s personality, CCJPL has a website that brings out its personality and connects with patrons and residents alike. As well, because of the library-focused content management system, updates are easy and more changes are happening across the site. The site’s relevancy with search engines has improved, and we’re seeing consistent visitor increases in a year, a consistently low bounce rate, and strong improvement in search engine visibility. Most importantly, residents and patrons get a clear picture of all the great work done at CCJPL.