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Competitors?
For the services Meyer Library provides, there are few, if any, competitors on the Stanford University campus as no other institution provides a comparable range of services under one roof. Thus, for this comparative competitive analysis, we take a look at counterpart institutions in other universities that provide a similar range of services.
We compared our services against the following universities':
On a scale of usability, ease-of-use and services offered, we find ourselves very favorably situated in comparison to these other major universities. The following figure shows a summary of the comparison:
Services
Only three out of our selection of eight well-known universities offered a range of services on their website that was comparable to ours. These websites all had a common theme of providing a combination of news, a bank of frequently asked questions and some general informations such as hours and access.
Web 2.0 Technology
One of the major drawbacks in all of these sites was a lack of activity because they are all still in the Web 1.0 world where content is updated periodically when a major event occurs or when an editorial staff decides that it's time to update the content on the website. These websites do not take advantage of Web 2.0 where user-generated content keeps websites alive and thriving.
With the Meyer Library website, we chose not to make these mistakes. Although the home page has some static content, which basically includes a set of categorized links that have been found to be the most commonly searched for information, the majority of it is content that changes dynamically based on user input. One such feature that has no parallel on the other websites is our unique Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) column that spans the right-most quarter of the home page. This is a live-updating list of questions that patrons ask consultants sorted by descending order of frequency. This allows the FAQ section to truly be an FAQ and not a static list of questions that is perhaps updated once every term and more often than not does not contain answers to many pertinent questions.
In addition to dynamic content on the home page, the written content on the Meyer Library website, which includes how-to and informational articles, is always followed by a comments section where visitors can leave their feedback on the usefulness of the article, and this gives us valuable information on how to improve both that and future articles.
Asking Questions Easily
The reason why Help Desks exist is so that they can answer questions. Yet only one out of the eight websites has a method for submitting a question without having to launch an email client or place a phone call. And on the one website, the feature, even though present, is not prominently displayed on the home page. On our website, we devote a relatively enormous amount of space to a button that has a single purpose - to let patrons ask a question. And instead of facing an elaborate form to fill out, the patron gets a simple single-line text field to ask their question and receive a response within seconds during our business hours.
Multilingual
The Meyer Library website has been built from the ground up to support easy internationalization. This is in stark contrast to all the other websites in our survey which do not offer information in any other language except English.
Ease-of-use
Again, only three out of the eight websites we compared against were able to offer a user interface that allows visitors to easily locate the information they need. However, two out of three of these websites didn't offer a large enough volume of information to be considered valuable resources in any case. Only Princeton University's website offered a combination of ease-of-use and services that is comparable to ours. However, their content is completely static and although they categorize information, the home page contains a large amount of text which is difficult to digest for a visitor. It fails the Control-F test, which means that the visitor needs to reach for the Find option in his browser to find what he is looking for, instead of being able to spot it at a glance.
With the Meyer Library website, one of our major aims was to allow the visitor to find what they need in an instant. This is why about 70% of the home page consists of large buttons that quickly lets the visitor jump to one of the known major areas of interest. If the visitor is unable to find what he is looking for in one of the large buttons, the second tier of information is the dynamically generated Frequently Asked Questions list which takes up the right-most quarter of the home page and is sorted in descending order of frequency such that, in scanning from the top to the bottom, which is the most natural way for humans, the visitor can locate his topic of interest within seconds. Finally, if the visitor is still unable to find what he is looking for, a large and inviting "Question?" button placed prominently in the center of the home page lets him query the consultants at the Tech Desk during business hours.
Our Vision
The one salient factor that has allowed us to be so ahead of our counterparts in other universities in terms of both usability and services has been our subscription to the Web 2.0 way of thinking in which our website is constantly changing and adapting to the needs of not just the day or hour, but that of every second. It is only in this way that it can remain useful and valuable to our patrons.
