The National Library of Israel is one of the oldest institutions in Israel, and it’s’ goal and biggest challenge (along with all of the cultural institutions’ challenge nowadays) is to open access to its content online, to engage the public with it, to invent new uses, formats, and meanings.
As a part of the product and design team, I am responsible for various types of work on core NLI products. Our main goal is to keep the library’s site updated, usable and engaging, content-wise, functionally, and aesthetically.
THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF ISRAEL, 1960, COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF ISRAEL ARCHIVE
THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF ISRAEL, 1960, COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF ISRAEL ARCHIVE
| Time period | 2018-2022 |
|---|---|
| My role | Junior designer - UI/UX designer in a digital department product team |
My work in NLI digital team
The National Library of Israel is one of the oldest institutions in Israel, and it’s’ goal and biggest challenge (along with all of the cultural institutions’ challenge nowadays) is to open access to its content online, to engage the public with it, to invent new uses, formats, and meanings. Connect people to knowledge and culture of Israel and of the Jewish people.
As a part of the product and design team, I am responsible for various types of work on core NLI products. Our main goal is to keep the library’s site updated, usable and engaging, content-wise, functionally, and aesthetically.
Business goals and objectives
Our main goal is to reach 4M sessions per month within three years. Therefore SEO-first strategy was put in front of every activity, and of course, we wanted to well balance it without sacrificing the UX
Finding new ways of engagement with content, mostly aimed at the general public, such as: pages based on popular/trending themes, including contextual links to other materials, unique features such as search by family name within historic press and more.
As many of our researches showed that the general public in Israel is unaware of the National Library existence. Therefore as part of the growth and renewal process, one of the important goals was to increase brand awareness of NLI.
Users & user research
The biggest part of NLI users are the general Israeli public, but not only. Academics and researchers use the catalog every day, and they make up 30% of the overall users.
As part of our joint efforts with product managers, we constantly researched user needs and expectations. We used A/B testing, user interviews, prototype testing, card sorting, surveys and other techniques in most of the products we worked on.
Challenges
The main design challenge was to achieve consistency in countless domains of the NLI digital presence.
Core use for NLI website: search, browse, view and order items in the catalog. It is a design, organizational, and systems challenge, as it reflects the rich history of the organization, its’ politics, ways of cataloging and other aspects. To overcome design inconsistency and optimize front-end development, we established the first Design System in the organization and based all the projects on it.
Three years summary
Through the three year of our work on the NLI site, here is what we managed to accomplish:
✔️ Revised and rebuilt the site architecture, SEO-first strategy / SEO-oriented page data structure
✔️ Monthly sessions — x10 times growth in three years (from roughly 70,000 in 2018 to 1,900,000 in 2020), and we are on track for 4,000,000 by 2023
✔️ Established Design System
✔️ Designed for dozens of new page templates & features
✔️ Design with accessibility built-in, without the need for third plug-in
✔️ Always using user-centered approach, through data analytics / UX workshops / AB testing / user surveys / user interviews and “over-the-shoulder” observation