Harris County Public Library

www.hcpl.net

As a resident of Houston, I love this website – the HCPL’s site is such a useful resource.  However, it is not the easiest website to use.

Intended Audience:

• Residents of the Harris County area (including Houston and surrounding neighborhoods), who are new to the area and are trying to discover the library’s  resources about the community
• Residents of Harris County who are also members of the Harris County Public Library system, who either manage their HCPL accounts online or who are looking through the HCPL’s online catalog
• Residents of the Harris County area who are looking for employment at the HCPL system
  

Usefulness of Content:

The website contains both information about the system itself (locations, hours, job openings), and the HCPL’s catalog.  www.hcpl.net also an impressive number of article databases, a digital library (including audio books, movies and music), and links to information about the Harris County area.  The HCPL aims to make themselves an important part of your web experience – they have a downloadable toolbar for web browsers, a blog, and an “Info 24/7 Chat” function.

Consistency of Design:

All of the main pages of the website www.hcpl.net have the same horizontal navigation system.  HCPL also makes use of a tabbed file look, with contrasting colors and arrows to designate which level of the website the user is on.  Besides the main navigation at the top, the user can also access the “Catalog” and “My Account/Renew” pages from any page in the site, which is important, since these are some of the biggest functions of the website.  The “Catalog” and “MyAccount/Renew” pages actually lead to different place on the site:  www.catalog.hcpl.net.  Because this is a different website, it has a different navigation bar at the top of the screen, but the overall look is very similar to the home website.  The colors of the catalog site are green, whereas the colors for the main website are blue.

One really great aspect of the HCPL’s website I noticed this week after the talk of accessibility and usability: on the home page there is a notice telling users that certain parts of the website have been moved recently, as well as a link to the “Enhanced Website for PDA and Mobile Phone Users.”  These notices are in red, which is the only real instance of that color on the site, so that the user’s eye is drawn to the information provided.

Ease of Navigation:  

One design issue I have with www.hcpl.net is that both unvisited and visited links are blue – unvisited links are a brighter blue, but there is little contrast on my computer screen.  This should probably be changed to help with readability.

Navigating through the website, it’s not very clear sometimes where in the site the user is – the second level of hierarchy is listed, but not the third or forth.  For example, when a user clicks on the link “New Titles Cataloged in Past 30 Days” from the homepage, they are taken to a page which denotes on the top navigation bar is under the main page “Books,” but looking at the pages that the tab “Books” will take the user to, there is nothing that says “New Titles” or “Recently Added.”  So the user has no idea where the webpage exists.

I love the physical location of the HCPL (I’ve been to several branches and it is a very nice library), but their page could use some work on the navigation.  They have got a lot of good content, but have not organized it in the best way, and it can be rather confusing to the user.