As readers and content both go increasingly online, findability becomes an ever greater concern. The organization of content therefore becomes more and more important. Content can’t be effective if it is not found. There are three components to content organization: classification, relationships, and stickiness. Traditionally, we have focused most of our effort on classification as a… Read More »
Summary: Today there is no “right place” to put information that will ensure that readers find it. Instead, we have to focus on making sure our content gets filtered in to the reader’s search. Every Page is Page One information design and bottom-up information architectures are key to achieving this. The “right place” for content… Read More »
Supply subject area context; avoid institutional context. In a recent blog post, On the Web, context kills, speed saves, Gerry McGovern states: A key difference between web writing and writing for print is that on the Web you need to avoid context and instead focus on instructional, how-to, task-based content. Since one of my seven… Read More »
We worry a lot about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I suspect we don’t worry enough about Social Curation Optimization (hereby dubbed SCO). Social curation plays a large role in how people find content on the Web. Google’s Eric Schmidt was recently quoted as saying: Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter also allow users to leverage their social… Read More »
Findability is a filtering problem. There is a whole whack of stuff on the Web. To find what you want, you have to filter it. So if you can provide your visitors with a more sophisticated filter, such as a faceted navigation or a taxonomy-based browsing experience, they will have more success finding stuff, right? Not… Read More »
Findability is a constant theme in content strategy and technical communications, yet it seems to me that people often treat findability as a problem existing outside the content. Findability is addressed using SEO tactics and by devising sophisticated top-down navigational aids, such as taxonomies and faceted navigation, but it is seldom seen as issue to… Read More »
I argued in Too Big to Browse; Too Small to Search, that search works best when it has a large amount of content to work with. But it occurs to me that there is a really important caveat to be made, which I can best express as the difference between findability and searchability. The distinction… Read More »
Findability continues to be the bete noire of technical communication. This may be a parallax error, but it seems that findability is more of a problem in technical communication than in other fields. The reason, I suspect, is that many technical documentation suites are too big to browse but too small to search. I have… Read More »
Links are expensive. That’s a problem, because the web is, and always has been, a hypertext medium, a medium of links. Links, as I have argued previously, are the last mile of findability. Links are how readers move around in your content. More importantly, links are what keep readers in your content, rather than Googling… Read More »
Many discussions of the advantages or disadvantages of topic-based documentation seem to neglect the different view of the user that is inherent in the move from the traditional textbook style manual to standalone topics. Topics are not simply a new mechanism for composing and constructing documents, nor are they simply about enabling reuse, or about… Read More »