Findability is Paramount
When information architecture guru Peter Morville published his seminal findability guide Ambient Findability in 2005, the Internet community took particular notice of the mantra that should henceforth be our primary guide for the fields of information retrieval and interface design: that findability must be paramount, more so even than usability. As essential as usability is, if one's website website cannot be easily located by the user base, all else counts for naught.
The Growing Complexity of the Web
With the constant advancements in search engine optimization, increasingly complex search routines, and the sheer mass of miscellaneous content now populating the World Wide Web, it is no wonder that the significance of findability is finally being recognized. As the folksonomy of the web grows, it becomes increasingly anthropomorphic. Like synapses in the human brain, new associative connections between bits of data are formed constantly: Relevance by association. To browse these vast oceans of data, search engines (and their bots) are becoming more sophisticated, users are becoming more sophisticated, and we, as web designers and coders must become more sophisticated.
Our Mission
By now even the most conservative members of the web community must recognize that, in this digital realm, the traditional taxonomic system of information classification, organization and retrieval are outdated. Here at findabilitynow we intend to chart the evolution of these taxonomies, and thus of the field of findability, and to note principles, best practices and definitions of said field.
