Joplin Public Library - Website Evaluation

This was a project from one of my Information Architecture courses. We were provided a choice of several libraries to review. The evaluation spanned the entire course, with incremental steps chosen for completion at scheduled intervals.

We began by writing a proposal which became the first building block of the final deliverable. The proposal consisted of what the client provided as a list of needs and desires in addition to the methods that would be used to evaluate the site.

The next phase of the evaluation involved recruitment of interview participants. The interviews were conducted remotely via Zoom due to the pandemic. The results were used to discover user needs, goals, and common activities. The common personas and focal point tasks were derived from the interviews also, and used to help complete the remaining steps.

The third phase involved interviewing the users through the method of Treejack testing, allowing for unmoderating testing of specific areas of the site based on the topic areas discovered previously.

The fourth phase involved interviewing users through Chalkmark testing. This method of heatmapping illustrates if the information architecture is in line with how the intended user would use the site or if restructuring would be recommended.

Once all of the testing and evaluation was completed, and the results analyzed, the information is compiled into the final deliverable.