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Research guides: Best practices for design & accessibility

Put the most important information on the Home page

Research suggests students are not navigating to secondary tabs on LibGuides because they expect to find what they need on the Home tab (Bergstrom-Lynch, 2019).

In an example study, Home tab page views represented over half of the total views in the sample (Castro-Gessner et al, 2013).

Put the most important information on the Home page. For many of our research guides, that will include a list of key databases. If students are unlikely to look beyond your Home page, what information do you really want them to have?

How to present information

  • Avoid putting information in the left column below the side navigation tabs - users miss this! (Exception: contact information/profile boxes can go there)
  • Do not put everything in one guide - create course guides
  • If you have a subpage or tab on your guide for a specific course, move it to a new guide - put links to your broader subject guide on your course guide and vice versa
  • Provide short descriptions below each resource on your guide so users know what they are clicking on - do not use rollover descriptions
  • Be selective about what you include - information overload is a key barrier for LibGuides users (Hill, 2020)
  • Please do not go rogue: Stick to default fonts, font sizes, and colours - they have been chosen with accessibility in mind and to create consistency throughout our guides
  • Lists presented in order of relevance are more helpful to users - rather than presenting a list of recommended databases in alphabetical order, put the most relevant database(s) at the top of the list
  • The Home page should be called Home, rather than "Getting Started" or something similar

What type of guide?

LibGuides offers six different guide "Types." When creating a new guide, you are required to assign it a type. You can change your guide type at any time by selecting the pencil icon beside "Type" on the edit screen.

 

Edit screen for a LibGuide. An arrow is pointing to a pencil icon that allows you to edit the guide type

 

What guide type should I choose?

There is no difference in defaults, layout, or functionality of the different guide types. Exception: Internal guides and Template guides are for internal use only and not visible to users.

  • General purpose guide: miscellaneous guides that do not fit into other categories
  • Course guide: created to support specific courses
  • Subject guide: created to support a specific subject/discipline (e.g., Biology, Classics, Earth Sciences)
  • Topic guide: how-to guides or guides that highlight specific topics (e.g., 2SLGBTQIA+ health, Academic Research Skills, Citation Styles)
  • Internal guide: created for internal use only on any topic; not visible to users who are not logged in
  • Template guide: created to hold reusable templates; for internal use only and not visible to users who are not logged in

Side menu

The side menu contains the names of your guide pages. Based on what we know of common web reading practices, it is one of the first places a user will look when they arrive at your guide.

  • Side menu titles should be short (3 words max)
  • Side menu titles should be descriptive and meaningful
  • The number of side menu titles should be manageable (6-7 seems to be the consensus in the literature)
  • The Home page should be called Home, rather than "Getting Started" or something similar

Box-level navigation

We recommend setting any guide containing more than two pages of content to show Box-level navigation for selected page. Box-level navigation for the selected page will allow users to quickly see an overview of the content they can expect to find on the guide page (Hyams, 2020). This will increase usability and draw attention to the content of your page without users needing to scroll. Below you will find examples of what the side navigation looks like on a guide with and without box-level navigation.

To set your guide to box-level navigation

  • Click on the image dropdown on the top left of your guide
  • Select Guide Navigation Layout
  • Tick the box beside Show box-level navigation for selected page
  • Click Save

Screenshot showing an image dropdown selected and open to show the options beneath. The first option, Guide Navigation Layout, has a red arrow pointing to it.

Box-level navigation examples

Screenshot of LibGuides shows tabs along left-side navigation. The tab

Box-level navigation

In this example, the guide is using box-level navigation. When a user has clicked on a box (in this case, "Find articles") the names of the boxes on that page pop out on the left-side navigation. This will give the user a sense of what is on the page.

Screenshot of LibGuides shows tabs along left-side navigation. The tab

No box-level navigation

In this example, box-level navigation has not been selected. When the user clicks on a page, the boxes on the page do not appear in the left side navigation.

Friendly URLs

Assign a friendly URL to your guide and to each page on your guide. A friendly URL is much clearer for students and easier to put on a handout or PowerPoint slide. 

What to call your friendly URL

If you have existing friendly URLs that do not follow these guidelines (like the one in the screenshot), do not edit your friendly URLs. Just keep the following in mind for next time:

  • Use lowercase and dashes between words (friendly-url-example)
    • If the page/tab name is short, use that 
    • If the tab is more than 4 words 
      • You’ll need to be a little creative. Focus on what is easy to remember, spell, and gives the user enough enough info about what the page/tab would be about if they didn’t have any more context
How to create a friendly URL

To create a friendly URL, click on the pencil icon beside URL to change it to something meaningful.

Edit screen for a LibGuide. An arrow is pointing to a pencil icon that allows you to edit the URL

 

This will create a friendly URL for your guide. Once you have done this, you will be able to create friendly URLs for each page. To do so, click on the page you would like to edit. Toward the top of the page, you will find a pencil icon that allows you to edit the URL for that specific page.

Edit screen for a LibGuide. An arrow is pointing to a pencil icon that allows you to edit the page URL

 

Screenshots of search boxes - AVOID!

Visual aids can be helpful in offering a step-by-step overview of a process. However, research has shown that screenshots of search boxes cause confusion and frustration for users. Why? Because they think they are real search boxes. Avoid.

 

See what I mean?

Screenshot of Novanet search box