Last night I went to the WSG London Findability event at Westminster University. The event was part of London Web Week. As always, apologies for any errors; corrections and comments are welcome.
First up was Cyril Doussin with an 'introduction to findability'.
A lot of it is based on research by Peter Morville, particularly Ambient Findability.
So what do people search for?
Knowledge – about oneself; about concepts/meaning; detailed info (product details, specs); entities in society (people, organisations, etc.)
Opinions – to validate a feeling or judgement; establish trust relationships; find complementary judgements.
What is information? From simple to complex – data -> information -> knowledge.
Findability is 'the quality of being locatable or navigatable'.
Item level – to what degree is a particular object easy to discover or locate?
System level – how well does the environment support navigation and retrieval?
Wayfinding requires: knowing where you are; knowing your destination; following the best route; being able to recognise your destination; being able to find your way back.
The next section was about how to make something findable:
The "in your face" discovery principle – expose the item in places known to be frequented by the target audience. He showed an example of a classic irritating Australian TV ad, a Brisbane carpet store in this case. It's disruptive and annoying, but everyone knows it exists. [Sadly, it made me a little bit homesick for Franco Cozzo. 'Megalo megalo megalo' is also a perfect example of targeting a niche audience, in this case the Greek and Italian speakers of Melbourne.]
Hand-guided navigation – sorting/ordering (e.g. sections of a restaurant menu); sign-posting.
Describe and browse (e.g. search engines) – similar to asking for directions or asking random questions; get a list of entry points to pages.
Mixing things up – the Google 'search within a search' and Yahoo!'s 'search assist' box both help users refine searches.
Recommendations (communication between peers) – the searcher describes intent; casual discussions; advice; past experiences.
The web is a referral system. Links are entry doors to your site. There's a need for a relevancy system whether search engines (PageRank) or peer-based systems (Digg).
Measuring relevance (effectiveness):
Precision – if it retrieves only relevant documents
Recall – whether it retrieves all relevant documents.
Good tests for the effectiveness of your relevance mechanism:
Precision = number of relevant and retrieved documents divided by the total number retrieved.
Recall = number of relevant and retrieved documents divided by the total number of relevant documents.
Relevance – need to identify the type of search:
Sample search – small number of documents are sufficient (e.g. first page of Google results)
Existence search – search for a specific document
Exhaustive search – full set of relevant data is needed.
Sample and existence searches require precision; exhaustive searches require recall.
Content organisation:
Taxonomy – organisation through labelling [but it seems in this context there's no hierarchy, the taxon are flat tags].
Ontology – taxonomy and inference rules.
Folksonomy – a social dimension.
[In the discussion he mentioned eRDF (embedded RDF) and microformats. Those magic words – subject : predicate : object.]
Content organisation is increasingly important because of the increasing volume of information and sharing of information. It's also a very good base for search engines.
Measuring findability on the web: count the number of steps to get there. There are many ways to get to data – search engines, peer-based lists and directories.
Recommendations:
Aim to strike a balance between sources e.g. search engine optimisation and peer-based.
Know the path(s) your audience(s) will follow (user testing)
Understand the types of search
Make advertising relevant (difficult, as it's so context-dependent)
Make content rich and relevant
Make your content structured
I've run out of lunch break now, but will write up the talks by Stuart Colville and Steve Marshall later.