Library App
UX Review
A great service. A website that got in the way.
City of Sydney libraries serve a large, active patron base — but the primary digital touchpoint was a website not built for mobile or for speed. Managing loans, holds, and branch visits meant navigating a desktop-era interface on a phone screen.
Patrons needed a purpose-built mobile app with direct integration into the Library Management System — one designed around how they actually use the service, not how the back-end is organised.
Persona-led. Stakeholder-managed.
Discovery began with structured research across patron and staff user groups — identifying pain points, tech comfort, and behavioural patterns. This produced a single primary persona that defined feature priorities and kept every subsequent tradeoff legible.
Internally, stakeholder groups shaped the requirements: IT and Security, Legal and Privacy, Library Services, and Executive Leadership. Externally, the project coordinated several vendors — the app developer, LMS, identity and authentication, and public access IT — ensuring every integration dependency resolved into a seamless patron-facing experience.
A shipped product serving a genuinely active community.
The priority features identified through the persona and CX process made it into the delivered app — live on iOS and Android for all City of Sydney library patrons. Loans, renewals, holds, branch finder, and linked accounts all shipped.
In 2025, more than one million people visited City of Sydney libraries, 1.8 million items were borrowed, and over 20,000 new members joined. The app sits at the centre of that activity — reducing friction for the patrons who use the network most.
The library service itself was well-regarded. The website was the friction point — not designed for mobile, not integrated tightly enough with the LMS. A purpose-built app with direct LMS access removed the problem at the source.
Patrons don't just want to know a book exists — they want to know where it is before they travel. Surfacing branch-level availability as a first-class feature turned a catalogue into a logistics tool.
A power-user persona would push toward richer discovery and reading community features. Anchoring on Sarah kept every decision legible: short sessions, moderate tech comfort, task completion over exploration.
The City of Sydney Library App — an overview of the service and how it works for patrons.
