Professional work
Nearly five years of making a library website work for everyone
Accessible, data-led web design for a university library.
The short version
Problem: A busy library website serving students, faculty and staff, where people struggled to find rooms, resources and answers.
What I did: Ran research, redesigned key pages, built the front end in accessible HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and used analytics to keep improving.
Result: A library site that kept getting better through research, testing and analytics.
Why this one matters
Public institutions have to work for everyone: every device, every ability, every deadline-panicked student at 11pm. For nearly five years I designed and built in that environment, with WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard, not a nice-to-have.
Story one: the homepage redesign
The old homepage tried to be everything to everyone. I ran interviews and card sorts to learn what people actually came for, helped restructure the page around those top tasks to reduce bounce, then built it mobile-first in Bootstrap. A/B tests kept us honest.
Story two: the booking form people kept abandoning
Room booking and event registration were full of confusing date and time controls. I simplified the layout and cleaned up the pickers so the interface only asked for what mattered, with the aim of reducing form abandonment.
Accessibility, for real
Semantic HTML, keyboard navigation testing and screen reader audits, plus compliance reviews with QA.
And the data
I set up custom Google Analytics tracking and automated monthly reports, so design decisions had evidence behind them and the whole team could see what was working.
Side quests
Posters, banners and icons for library programming, and interactive displays in Mount Royal’s Immersion Studio. Show these as a short gallery.
What it looks like
Three image frames: the homepage redesign; the booking form before and after; the side quests gallery.
Results
The through-line was a loop: research told us what people needed, A/B tests and analytics told us whether changes worked, and monthly reports kept everyone looking at the same evidence.
Reflection
Shipping improvements to a live public site that cannot go down taught me to be careful, collaborative and patient, and to treat accessibility as part of the build, not a final check.
