findability.org: A good start, but no search · 258 words posted 05/28/2004 03:11 PM
You have to feel for Information Architects: as the librarians of the information age, they are mostly cut from eat-your-vegetables stock. IA specialists have seen the feverish attention of the blogosphere pass them by for flashier luminaries covering usability and standards. (Reflect, for a moment, that we work in a field so insular that you can read a sentence in which “flashy” and “standards” are juxtaposed without blinking.)
“How to find stuff” might be hot—Google and Microsoft are in a race to present a unified search tool stretching from the web to your hard drive and back again—but it is not sexy. There is, as yet, no design eye for the findability guy.
Peter Morville has launched Findability, a portal dedicated to, well, finding stuff (via Clagnut). As Morville, co-author of the polar bear book, argued on this site in October 2002, findability precedes usability: you can’t use what you can’t find.
How does findability differ from IA? According to the FAQ:
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.
The distinction is lost on me, but Findability is a handy resource for topics as varied as social networks, trust, visualization, and wayfinding. Incredibly, though, if you want to search findability.org, you’ll have to do it through google—as of this writing, I could not find a search form anywhere on the site.
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