Yet another Balsamiq Mockup. I think i’m getting addicted to it.
This time a web user interfaces as well as information architecture.
Scroll all the way down to find out my thoughts behind the design

Project Brief:
With the RP Library as your research space, devise a strategy to prepare the Library for the Internet Search Generation.

Considerations
- Users (RP students and staff)
- Findability of a book
- Experience of the user
- How a library in the near future be like?

With those considerations we did a task-flow of a typical user with certain conditions.
The user already knows the title and the author of the book.
Objective: Find the book and loan it.
So one of my team mates went on trying to use the current website
Here are some pictures in navigational order

Thoughts Behind the Design
A library is used by people of all ages. *Almost Everyone*
The purpose of a library is to allow the public to get access to books for educational purposes
As time pass, the library has evolved to something more than just books.
A communal place to play,study and grow as a person.
Lots of events & activities happen in the library.
Yet, finding books is not is still difficult.

When I see the word catalogue, i thought of a wide array of different types of books. (Like those IKEA catalogues)
To my dismay it was a search function.
That limits the online library to a basic/advanced search.
Which meant that the user have to know exactly what they are looking else the search wouldn’t work.

For my design of the online library portal, I went away from the search as a primary function and went to the findability portion of the library
Having a scenario where the user wants to find books relating a certain topic, example: Fashion

In a typical library, a user will have to go to a specific location/section of a shelf with all the books about fashion(& more)
This allows the users to take their time to look through the shelf and find books that interest them. The user would pull out the book from the shelf to find out more about the book

What this interface does is to translate the experience to accommodate both new and existing users to the site as well as to give them more choices in finding relevant books. The left sidebar uses an ambiguous organization pattern as it is arrange by the genre of the book. Given the amount of books available in the library, the sidebar would use a shallow & deep information architecture which means there will be alot of sub-categories, under design, there could be sketching,interior, living spaces, industrial, etc. That would be there would be a faceted search that will allow the uses to narrow down the books to a limited option based on certain conditions set by the user.

The users will spend more time on the website trying to find books in a specific topic given the wide variety of books. If that book is loaned out, the user can always reserve or loan out a book that is of similar context. When the user clicks on the book, it will have a side-pop that describes book as well as related books. This replicates the action when the user takes out the book from the shelf. If they do not want to loan the book yet, they can close the pop-up.(put it back on the shelf). Key features are that it only takes a few minutes for each user to learn how to use the interface and then they are free to explore the site and given unlimited paths for them to choose. Education last a lifetime and everyone is constantly learning yound or old.

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