Findability
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Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval.
Findability is not limited to the World Wide Web. The concept of findability is universal and timeless. However, with a distributed, heterogeneous collection of several billion items, the Web does present unique and important findability challenges.
Findability is not a synonym for information architecture (IA). Information architecture is a discipline concerned with the structural and semantic design of shared information spaces. Findability is a goal of IA, along with usability, desirability, credibility, and accessibility. Many people contribute to the findability of websites and intranets, including writers, designers, and developers.
Peter Morville is most credited to creating the term (findability).
[edit] See also
- Annotation
- Information retrieval
- Knowledge mining
- Knowledge representation
- Semantic web
- Usability
- User interface
- Web indexing
[edit] External links
- findability.org: a collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability
- The age of findability (article)
- Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (article on the findability impact of a site's choice of words)
- Ambient Findability (book)
- Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond (book)
- Building an Online Presence, Research Article
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