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.

See also

• Annotation
• Information retrieval
• Knowledge mining
• Knowledge representation
• Semantic web
• User interface

External links

• findability.org: a collection of links to people, software, organizations, and content related to findability
• The age of findability (article)
• Ambient Findability (book)

Knowledge representation | Information science

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Findability