Research guides: Best practices for design & accessibility

The purpose of this guide is to establish best practices for creating and maintaining LibGuides. These best practices are intended to be user-centred and rely on many web writing principles that would apply on any website (remember: LibGuides are websites! - Ula Lechtenberg, 2023). We have also included LibGuides-specific recommendations drawn from the LIS literature.

Before you go any further, some key recommendations that recur again and again in the literature and will appear throughout this guide:

• Be concise: Cluttered, busy guides are unappealing and a barrier for users
• Put the most important information on the Home page
• Limit the number of side tabs on your guide (6-7 is the general recommendation)
• Keep resource descriptions concise (no more than 2 sentences clearly explaining their purpose), but DO have those explainers!
• Choose bullet points over blocks of text
• Avoid (or at least define) library jargon
• Teach your guide in your library instruction sessions so the students see the immediate relevance to their coursework 
• Consider creating individual course guides, ideally in consultation with the course professor

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