Peter Morville introduces the hexagram honeycomb of Findability … 

Can users find our web site ?

Can users find their way around our web site ?

Are our web sites useful ?

Are our web aitws desirable ?  Do we want them to be found ?

Are our web sites accessible ?

Is what we put on our web sites credible ?

Finally, is what is on our web sites valuable, to those who comne to our web sites and to us ?

Key words – the web’s equivalent of “location, location, location”

People tend to trust search results high up on search listsings

“Google defines your brand” ?

Case Study #1 .. National Institute of Cancer Research

They wanted to improve ability of users to get from home page to relevant content.

Vast majority of users not doctors or researchers, but members of the public who have an experience with cancer and want to know more about something.

PM – how did people get here in the first place ?

Cancer was the single most common query, but many searches on specific tyopes of cancer.

PM’s argument … not your mission to build a great web site, but to make content finable and useful.

Won a range of awards …

Good things can happen when you focus on findability

Case Study #2 – Enterprise Findability

Fortune 500 company – horrible, circa 1995

Enterprise Findability = IA + KM + Search (Information architecture + Knowledge management + search) 

The Future

Any architect – physical or digital – needs to have one foot in the past and one foot in the future.

Bigger picture, longer-term trends – positioning to take advantage of trends

Findability (noun):

The qusality of being locatable or navigable

The degree to which an object is easy to discover or locate

The degree to which a system or environment supports wayfinding, navigation, etc.

Ambient (adj): encircling, surrounding, enveloping

In the past – the good old days (Librarians had power)

Chained Libraries in the past

Today drowning in increasing amounts of information

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”

What is this doing to our ability to think, make decisions, etc.

Vast amounts of metadata, more interconnected and networked devices, etc.

“We ain’t seen nothing yet”

Convergence of mobile devices with location awareness .. 

Example of GPS kid-locator

Morville – interesting to note that in reviews and comments very little about invasion of privacy, issues of control … mostly about the fact that the device did not work well enough.

Cisco wireless application … tag-and-track high-value objects (eg hospitals always losing wheelchairs, spend amazing amounts of staff time looking for wheelchairs).

Once you create infrastructure for this kind of technology, you can address the issues of wayfinding.

In a world where we are creating more and bigger information haystacks, how can we create bigger needles ?

People cannot shut up about metadata .. it’s become “sexy” (this is not your mother’s metadata).

Folksonomies (let people tag whatever / however they want) … Morville is stretching the point of ridicule about this simplicity, but on purpose)

Of course we still need to think about structure and order, we also need to acknowledge some of the useful and asy, user-friendly aspects of what Web 2.0 and social software has offered us to date.

Queries can evolve over the course of a serach .. iterative, interactive and supportive of learning

Therefore absolutely critical to whatever KM becomes .. search is a complex adaptive system (cue Dave Snowden’s work on sensemaking).

“How do we provide people with an intelligent useful “next step” ?

Behaviour Patterns (Narrow, Search & Browse & Ask, Pearl Grow)

Design Patterns (Best Bets, Query Disambiguation, Federated Search, Faceted Navigation, Auto-Suggest (Queries, Auto-Suggest (Results), Structured Queries, Social Search, Integrating Web 2.0 into Enterprise Search, Media Search, Making Interfaces Actionable, Drag-and-Drop, Infinite Scroll (anti-pattern), Colour and Shape Patterns, Spime Search (queries using RFID capabilities), Redefining what is meant by Search).

Other Emerging Issues – linking physical with virtual

He displayed a chart outlining ways to explore possible futures, and miscellaneous tools and services that can be explored

Search is a wicked problem, no definitive method, wide (infinite) range of user issues, problems never fully resolved, only way forward is to share and explore together.

Share, share, share .. he is building a pattern library.