There is such a focus when planning an enterprise search or information management deployment that they’ll be doomed if they don’t plan for findability. I’ve seen these crazy stats quoted even to justify the effort to put in to this planning – crazy claims like one I saw from IBM stating the average information worker spends an average of two hours per day looking for information. Wow, can you imagine having workers like this on your team spending a couple hours every day just looking for things? Aside from researchers, who in their right mind would spend an average of a quarter of their eight-hour day lost and looking for things? Sure, there’s a lot of information out there, but what I work with most frequently I should hope I remember where I keep it or store it in a handy place so I don’t have to spend two hours searching for it tomorrow.
Findability is overrated. It is the idea that you need to think of all the ways that users might search for a given piece of content so that you can capture all the right metadata and store it in the right place. And this may seem logical, given how these crazy stats get quoted that apparently the average worker spends about a quarter of their workday looking for stuff. That’s a lot of productivity lost! Of course one would naturally want to make all that apparent searching more productive and help their users find all that content. It leads to this notion of making information more findable: if you put enough planning around the information architecture, there will be an explosion of productivity as users free up upwards of 25% of their workday from having to search for all this information.
It’s ludicrous, somewhat. I like the idea of connecting users to information, and improving that overall process. But instead of just making a faster widget, is there a way to enhance the whole process to get that desired end result? If it’s about connecting users to information, that can be a whole lot of things beyond one blinder-focused solution built around an anticipated search query. Besides, relevancy in searches is personal and in context, not simply preparing for what is considered a popular top query in any context.
What if instead of focusing on all the ways users might want to search for a given piece of content, the focus rather was on what content a given user might need at different times? Instead of the findability of content, let the focus be on the discoverability of content. A lot of the exercises and design may be the same: you still need to tag and organize content; the difference is the concentration in how the content will be used, namely what value it brings. Information discovery: how can the right information be exposed to the right user in the right context, at just the right time? (Maybe even without the user having to go searching for it).
I love Amazon, because they expose the right information to me in the right context, and usually at just the right time. When I open the home page, they show me different books I may be interested in, which often I am, and this satisfies me right away. Other times, there’s a book I’m already thinking about and do a quick search to find. While I’m reading a summary about this book, Amazon also suggests other similar books I may be interested in, and if I add it to my cart I get presented with other books that are likely to be of interest related to what I was shopping for during this and recent sessions.
Telemarketers use this technique as well when the caller’s computer updates their script depending on how the call is going. My account manager at my bank has offers on his computer prompting him to offer me different products and services at different times, depending on the context of what he is reviewing (although I always find it a little weird when I go in to withdrawal a roll of dollar coins to have change handy for parking and laundry, and this somehow leads to a discussion on whether I’m interested in a new mortgage).
Some companies and industries are well on their way with this focus. It’s no different really than having efficiency experts map the process on a factory floor around what adds value to tasks the workers actually perform, and bringing that concept to understanding what the knowledge worker does and what would be valuable information to make available to them, in what context, and at what time. The underlining technology is still search driven; the focus is just on the user’s experience and anticipated value interacting with the content: a focus on information discoverability rather than simply generic findability of a piece of content.
Great post, Steve. I think your entire thesis can be distilled to your final sentence:
“The underlining technology is still search driven; the focus is just on the user’s experience and anticipated value interacting with the content: a focus on information discoverability rather than simply generic findability of a piece of content.”
User experience is key: What makes sense for the organization and how their people and teams work? It’s fundamentally naive to presume that this “sweet spot” can be hit by doing a lot of up-front planning in the dark without getting user feedback. A smarter strategy is to see the search experience for what it is: Complex and emergent. The answers aren’t immediately apparent, and while we have a lot of gee-whiz gizmos to distract us like semantic search and faceted search, these things have to have context and purpose.
Start small, evolve the search strategy outward. Observe real users and how they work – trying to cover all bases will only succeed in blowing your budget and leaving your users feeling like they’re using a second-rate Google.
I like that, great points!
Search = Content + Purpose
Search != Director goes to exec briefing and sees some slides on enterprise search…