White Pine Library Cooperative (WPLC) supports rural and small Michigan libraries by operating the Peabody Inter Library Loan program, connecting patrons to out-of-state resources. For the Peabody website to guarantee the program’s longevity, a full redesign is essential to strengthen and expand equitable access to information.
Project Manager, UX Designer, Researcher
Team of 4 Bachelor Students
Figma, FigJam, Miro, Qualtrics
August 2024 - April 2025
Michigan’s rural libraries face challenges accessing out-of-state materials due to costly subscriptions. The White Pine Library Cooperative’s interlibrary loan website helps bridge this gap. A website redesign is needed to ensure the program’s longevity and guarantee equitable access to information for Michigan residents.
I worked with 3 other students to create a user-centered solution for the White Pine Library Cooperative. We completed our work in a Research, Design, and Evaluation phase.
We employed a mixed-method approach that included both qualitative and quantitative techniques to gather a well-rounded understanding of user needs.
Screening Surveys
Segment users, identify common issues and find research participants
User Interviews
Explore workflows, challenges, and new ideas with current users
Contextual Inquiries
Observe real-time interactions and task flows in the interlibrary loaning system
Heuristic Evaluation
Identify usability issues using Nielsen's 10 heuristics
After completing our initial research, we used affinity mapping to group common themes of user insights.
Lack of easy viewing of current requests. Users must manually search by patron name or book title in order to view a request.
No immediate confirmation: Users are uncertain if a request was submitted unless they check another page.
Over reliance on email: Alerts are primarily sent via email, often overlooked or missed.
Desire for in-system updates: Users expressed a strong preference for internal notifications or a dashboard.
Users struggled with terminology like "request" vs. "loan" and what each action implied.
Navigation to specific features (e.g., tracking past requests) was not intuitive.
Entering ISBN or OCLC numbers caused errors and required tab-switching from external databases.
Lack of inline validation led to submission mistakes or uncertainty.
Users expressed the need for a modern interface, better font sizes, improved contrast, and clearer layouts.
The systems dated design limited ease of use, especially for new or infrequent users.
We then developed two user personas to guide our design decisions and meet their distinct workflows and needs.
User Persona 1: Experienced System User
User Persona 2: Novice System User
Next we created a user journey map to visualize the current system workflow.
We started our design phase by ideating proposed redesigns and features, which we then prioritized using a feasibility-value matrix to ensure alignment with user needs and client goals.
We conducted 5 usability tests with current users to update our Figma prototype.
My teammate and I reviewing our designs during peer critiques.
We presented our project at the 2025 UMSI Student Exposition, winning 1st place for the Bachelor student category!
We also validated our Figma prototype with current users, achieving a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 95 for the new design. The team also presented our design to the client, gaining final approval for the project.