Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

Deadline for switching to side navigation

The time has come for us to switch our guides over to side navigation! The Research Guides Management Team (RGMT) has been planning on doing this since the migration to LibGuides 2, but wanted to give staff time to get used to the new system.

Because we know it might take a while for some to make the switch, we are giving a deadline of December 31, 2016 (end of Fall quarter) to switch your guides over on your own. Come winter quarter, we will go ahead and switch over any guides that remain with top (tab) navigation.

We made this decision for several reasons:

•          Every guide having the same navigation creates a better, more seamless experience for our users.
•          Side navigation is consistent with our current library website (and most website navigation in general).
•          Usability studies consistently show better performance with side navigation.
•          Analysis of usage statistics on our own guides strongly suggests that users aren’t following the tabs to second pages in tabbed guides. In fact, hits on non-home pages are almost exclusively from Google searches.
•          Side navigation works more seamlessly with LibGuides’ built-in responsive design, so the layouts translate better to mobile devices (and mobile usage of Guides is up almost 20%!).

Get help switching  your guides!

Check out the Best Practices Guide (Layout page) for help making the switch. It includes step-by-step instructions, explanation of templates, and examples.

http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/layout

In addition, stay tuned for several upcoming working sessions so you can work on your guides and get help from the RGMT and fellow colleagues.