Academic Library Website Design Principles: Development of a Checklist

The library profession is now heavily involved in providing access to information through library websites and it is a challenge to design a website that has reliable content and a user interface that is easy and intuitive to those who use it. This paper looks at the development of a checklist for best practice design principles for academic library websites using a Usability Index Checklist (UIC) developed from principles derived from the Human-Computer Interface (HCI) literature. As user acceptance and usability are major issues in the design of library websites this paper suggests that the design will be most successful when a user-centred design model is included in the development and implementation of academic library web pages.