Findability
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
[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)
.
