… but i couldn’t get past the stupid orphan story .. i was reading it, going yah yah yah ok ok get to the good stuff …
i didn’t make it.
what a ridiculous way to start an article like this. i don’t read things like this over my evening coffee, this is work-related. i was hoping i’d learn something, but the bs got in the way.
what’s that they say in your rather unique country? “cut to the chase” !!
@gene lu
bq. All these excuses failed to convince my co-worker the use of a site map and was left with her saying something along the lines of “I don’t think I’ve ever used a site map before”? and “If I can’t find what I’m looking for with the search, then I’d leave the site”?.
Yes, but fortunately there are a lot of people out there who aren’t as lazy or helpless as your colleague.
Another classic case of “I don’t use this, therefore no-one uses this”, and as wrong here as anywhere. For people who are prepared to use a couple of brain cells and a modicum of effort, a (well-designed) sitemap can be very useful – both for locating a particular page/section, and also for understanding the scope and remit of a website.
I appreciate your discussion on the issue of “findability” because it focuses on the basic reason people use the web – to find information. As web designers and developers, it’s so easy to get caught up in making the site look good and other factors, we can lose track of the fact that people are looking for information.
The article was so dense and intimidatingly structured that I didn’t bother reading it!
An article about findability should be simple to digest, similar to “Don’t Make Me Think”:http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206726043&sr=8-1&t=katwebdes-20 by Steve Krug.
A well designed page allows for appropriate xxxxxxxability.
Replace xxxxxxx with access, find, use, whatever.
Though I really believe putting words on things does help to understand them but insisting on a distinction between findability and usability for more than about 3 seconds is a waste of time. And I have not yet met an accessibility (meaning for handicapped folks like colorblind me) issue whose correct solution was not a generic usability improvement.
I need to learn how to generate site maps since they matter for SEO purposes.
And hide them from visitors. My interpretation is that I need not confront my visitors with my sitemap.
To me they are a sign that the designer knows the site is hard to navigate and that visitors are going to get lost. I always thought the ‘home’ link was the best ‘get me unlost’ tool. When I see ‘site map’, I am likely to ‘get lost’ in the ‘scram, go find a well designed page’ sense unless I am really compelled to use the site.
I tend to agree with Brandon that focusing overmuch on usability vs findability might be putting too fine a point on the difference between them, but i do think there is something to be said for a real difference.
I work in instructional design, and one of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about is how to make information meaningful to the learner. The best way I know how to do that is to map information to a learner’s internal landscape—to make what she already knows about the world apply to what I’m telling her.
Findability is rather like that in my mind. A site may be perfectly and logically usable, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the structure maps to my landscape—it doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes sense to me, based on how I would have organized it. So findability seem to be about creating ways for different people with different approaches to content/information to come upon the same material in a way that is logically or inherently meaningful to them, whether that means tagging content in various ways or providing alternate navigation sturctures, etc.
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Colette van Essen
“The domains of findability and usability overlap in that both seek to help users find content within a site, but findability extends further to encompass methods that help users find the site and re-discover it later”?
I love the article. It explains beautifully the importance of findability and the range of people that have to contribute to making it happen. However something I would like to add to the responsiblities of the developer is providing readable URLs. URL’s that give the user an idea of what the subject matter or content of a certain page is so that he or she can choose the right URL from the list of search results. It certainly is one of the “methods that help users find the site and re-discover it later”? don’t you think?
The emerging world of AJAX and ‘Web 2’ sharply bring into focus the willingness of too many webmasters to sacrifice both findability and usability, apparently in exchange for dramatic effect.
We have had the same issues, and continue to have them, with Flash and Java.
I’ve just spent the last year part-time developing an AJAX solution to navigation, in the hope that the promise of interactivity is not lost from the webspace to yet another plugin technology, as a side effect of poor findability.
HTML 5 gives a sniff of a promise to AJAX and navigation, but we’ll be a long time getting there in practice, even if all the major browser vendors cooperate.
A further issue in usability and findability in AJAX is overweight applications. The web in spite of broadband is still, and will always be as a serial network, subject to the speed constraint of the slowest link, often grinding down below dail-up speeds.
Add a heavy application, whether it’s AJAX, Flash or Java, and you’re lost for a very long time between where you’ve been and where you might get. Where you are at present still gets very boring after about 10 seconds.
We should not lose sight of the time domain in findability! Users simply bail out altogether before about 20 seconds.
After reading this article I was compelled to write and say how much I enjoyed it. You had some great insights and I believe that all people who work in our field should read this artice.
I know I’m going to share this article with my Creative Design team.
I also enjoyed the article from an artistic stand point. Often I find the only time I have to read about new ideas, thoughts, and opinions in our field is over my lunch break. So, it was with welcome surprise that this article wasn’t just another dry reading.
Great job.
You can expect one more customer for you book sales.
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Barry Kiffer
This article was a little long winded but the point is well taken. Findability and SEO are NOT the same. In fact some ranking fanatics can actually hurt a site’s findabilty by focusing too much on boosting their Google ranking with irrelevant keywords. High rankings on search engines are nice but they don’t always guarantee success.
A basic understanding of optimization is important for a copywriter to be able to write text which is organized in a manner which google is known to respond positively to. The most influential writing for optimization, has actually not been optimized in the sense of keyword density, but so interesting, that it became a magnet for bringing traffic into a site.
I’d agree that high rankings on search engines don’t always guarantee success. On the other hand, low rankings on search engines can pretty much guarantee an ongoing ad spend directly to search engines, and that’s pretty much forever.
Of course, there are always other sites linking to the website, but that means that visitors necessarily need to visit those sites just to find the link.
Can this be an optimum scenario? I think not. I think we need to deal with the medium with which we’re working, and not just part of it.
hey – great post. this is the stuff i struggle with every day. clients seem to get it when we discuss the nuts and bolts of SEO – you have to create better content and improve the interface elements of your site to improve conversions… for people and crawlers. but agencies focused on whizzy things and rigid project management schemas seem to have a tougher time selling it in…. it doesn’t really make sense, unless the be all and end all of a site build is to design it, deliver it and then cut and run. basically, when content production’s concerned, then i think most agencies aren’t built to hold the hands of clients and see them through the lifecycle of a site for the long term. more content savvy and consultancy is needed! you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head…
Great comment Stephen Down. I would say that your comment is fairly accurate for most people who do SEO. To truly take SEO to the next level you need to be worried about those people who are your true target market. If in SEO you are just trying to get numbers up and are strictly getting more and more people to the site without having those people be truly legitimate customers you aren’t doing the site much benefit. We want true conversions. In order to get your true conversions FINDABILITY and SEO need to fused into one major effort. Findability really is important and should be taken seriously.
Updating sitemaps can become such a hassle, but the truth is that they are still kind in the findability game
Whem I’m using wordpress I always use a dynamic plugin that updates and pings search engines after each post! Ahh.. wordpress spoils us
Nowadays it’s almost impossible to have a wordpress blog that google DOESN’T FIND automatically after a week, however it’s still vital to submit sitemaps
40 Reader Comments
Back to the Articlespare me
… but i couldn’t get past the stupid orphan story .. i was reading it, going yah yah yah ok ok get to the good stuff …
i didn’t make it.
what a ridiculous way to start an article like this. i don’t read things like this over my evening coffee, this is work-related. i was hoping i’d learn something, but the bs got in the way.
what’s that they say in your rather unique country? “cut to the chase” !!
Stephen Down
@gene lu
bq. All these excuses failed to convince my co-worker the use of a site map and was left with her saying something along the lines of “I don’t think I’ve ever used a site map before”? and “If I can’t find what I’m looking for with the search, then I’d leave the site”?.
Yes, but fortunately there are a lot of people out there who aren’t as lazy or helpless as your colleague.
Another classic case of “I don’t use this, therefore no-one uses this”, and as wrong here as anywhere. For people who are prepared to use a couple of brain cells and a modicum of effort, a (well-designed) sitemap can be very useful – both for locating a particular page/section, and also for understanding the scope and remit of a website.
drew stauffer
Getting the entire agency on board with these types of issues is such an uphill battle.
This is a great guide to start with though. Thanks.
Red Keel
I appreciate your discussion on the issue of “findability” because it focuses on the basic reason people use the web – to find information. As web designers and developers, it’s so easy to get caught up in making the site look good and other factors, we can lose track of the fact that people are looking for information.
Zack Katz
The article was so dense and intimidatingly structured that I didn’t bother reading it!
An article about findability should be simple to digest, similar to “Don’t Make Me Think”:http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206726043&sr=8-1&t=katwebdes-20 by Steve Krug.
Kevin Avegård
Perfect starting-guide. (:
Masood Nasser
This is how “tech” writing should be: fun, easy and be read in 5 minutes withouth a headache
cheers
Brandon Sussman
A well designed page allows for appropriate xxxxxxxability.
Replace xxxxxxx with access, find, use, whatever.
Though I really believe putting words on things does help to understand them but insisting on a distinction between findability and usability for more than about 3 seconds is a waste of time. And I have not yet met an accessibility (meaning for handicapped folks like colorblind me) issue whose correct solution was not a generic usability improvement.
I need to learn how to generate site maps since they matter for SEO purposes.
And hide them from visitors. My interpretation is that I need not confront my visitors with my sitemap.
To me they are a sign that the designer knows the site is hard to navigate and that visitors are going to get lost. I always thought the ‘home’ link was the best ‘get me unlost’ tool. When I see ‘site map’, I am likely to ‘get lost’ in the ‘scram, go find a well designed page’ sense unless I am really compelled to use the site.
amber simmons
I tend to agree with Brandon that focusing overmuch on usability vs findability might be putting too fine a point on the difference between them, but i do think there is something to be said for a real difference.
I work in instructional design, and one of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about is how to make information meaningful to the learner. The best way I know how to do that is to map information to a learner’s internal landscape—to make what she already knows about the world apply to what I’m telling her.
Findability is rather like that in my mind. A site may be perfectly and logically usable, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the structure maps to my landscape—it doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes sense to me, based on how I would have organized it. So findability seem to be about creating ways for different people with different approaches to content/information to come upon the same material in a way that is logically or inherently meaningful to them, whether that means tagging content in various ways or providing alternate navigation sturctures, etc.
kamran khan
there i want to say it,s a great article.
Colette van Essen
“The domains of findability and usability overlap in that both seek to help users find content within a site, but findability extends further to encompass methods that help users find the site and re-discover it later”?
I love the article. It explains beautifully the importance of findability and the range of people that have to contribute to making it happen. However something I would like to add to the responsiblities of the developer is providing readable URLs. URL’s that give the user an idea of what the subject matter or content of a certain page is so that he or she can choose the right URL from the list of search results. It certainly is one of the “methods that help users find the site and re-discover it later”? don’t you think?
David Chapman
The emerging world of AJAX and ‘Web 2’ sharply bring into focus the willingness of too many webmasters to sacrifice both findability and usability, apparently in exchange for dramatic effect.
We have had the same issues, and continue to have them, with Flash and Java.
I’ve just spent the last year part-time developing an AJAX solution to navigation, in the hope that the promise of interactivity is not lost from the webspace to yet another plugin technology, as a side effect of poor findability.
HTML 5 gives a sniff of a promise to AJAX and navigation, but we’ll be a long time getting there in practice, even if all the major browser vendors cooperate.
A further issue in usability and findability in AJAX is overweight applications. The web in spite of broadband is still, and will always be as a serial network, subject to the speed constraint of the slowest link, often grinding down below dail-up speeds.
Add a heavy application, whether it’s AJAX, Flash or Java, and you’re lost for a very long time between where you’ve been and where you might get. Where you are at present still gets very boring after about 10 seconds.
We should not lose sight of the time domain in findability! Users simply bail out altogether before about 20 seconds.
Edward Garana
After reading this article I was compelled to write and say how much I enjoyed it. You had some great insights and I believe that all people who work in our field should read this artice.
I know I’m going to share this article with my Creative Design team.
I also enjoyed the article from an artistic stand point. Often I find the only time I have to read about new ideas, thoughts, and opinions in our field is over my lunch break. So, it was with welcome surprise that this article wasn’t just another dry reading.
Great job.
You can expect one more customer for you book sales.
Barry Kiffer
This article was a little long winded but the point is well taken. Findability and SEO are NOT the same. In fact some ranking fanatics can actually hurt a site’s findabilty by focusing too much on boosting their Google ranking with irrelevant keywords. High rankings on search engines are nice but they don’t always guarantee success.
Jarod Clark
A basic understanding of optimization is important for a copywriter to be able to write text which is organized in a manner which google is known to respond positively to. The most influential writing for optimization, has actually not been optimized in the sense of keyword density, but so interesting, that it became a magnet for bringing traffic into a site.
Diane Vigil
I’d agree that high rankings on search engines don’t always guarantee success. On the other hand, low rankings on search engines can pretty much guarantee an ongoing ad spend directly to search engines, and that’s pretty much forever.
Of course, there are always other sites linking to the website, but that means that visitors necessarily need to visit those sites just to find the link.
Can this be an optimum scenario? I think not. I think we need to deal with the medium with which we’re working, and not just part of it.
roger warner
hey – great post. this is the stuff i struggle with every day. clients seem to get it when we discuss the nuts and bolts of SEO – you have to create better content and improve the interface elements of your site to improve conversions… for people and crawlers. but agencies focused on whizzy things and rigid project management schemas seem to have a tougher time selling it in…. it doesn’t really make sense, unless the be all and end all of a site build is to design it, deliver it and then cut and run. basically, when content production’s concerned, then i think most agencies aren’t built to hold the hands of clients and see them through the lifecycle of a site for the long term. more content savvy and consultancy is needed! you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head…
eybl
An excellent article that makes one think of how they build their web site. I would just like an example of how it works in practice.
FrancoLittle
Great comment Stephen Down. I would say that your comment is fairly accurate for most people who do SEO. To truly take SEO to the next level you need to be worried about those people who are your true target market. If in SEO you are just trying to get numbers up and are strictly getting more and more people to the site without having those people be truly legitimate customers you aren’t doing the site much benefit. We want true conversions. In order to get your true conversions FINDABILITY and SEO need to fused into one major effort. Findability really is important and should be taken seriously.
Johnny Optimo
Updating sitemaps can become such a hassle, but the truth is that they are still kind in the findability game
Whem I’m using wordpress I always use a dynamic plugin that updates and pings search engines after each post! Ahh.. wordpress spoils us
Nowadays it’s almost impossible to have a wordpress blog that google DOESN’T FIND automatically after a week, however it’s still vital to submit sitemaps