Thursday, August 21, 2008

Is Findability, Usability?

Hi guys,
Most of the product developers don't give a second thought how their information is organized on the site,because most of the times the information architecture is done by the designers who hardly know what Usability is.I hope you all agree with me if I say that,unless one finds what he/she is looking for in a product cannot use it.If they cannot find it,then they cant use it. Hence,giving the importance to the Findability of information or features is very important.
Let me share an incident happened with me recently,to tell you why Findability is important...
Our iron box is generally placed near the plug point in the corner of my children's bedroom,but that day my wife placed it on the computer table while cleaning the room,and when I went into the room looking for it could not find it though it was right in front of me.I came out of the room yelling that it's not there.I was dragged into the room and was shown it lying on the comp table. It immediately struck me......oh man !!! it's Findability issue :-)
Moral of the incident- though I was looking around was not really seeing the object I wanted to as my mind was programmed to look for it in the place I expected it to be.
That means,Users expect certain information on specific locations,based upon their previous usage experience . Therefore,placing the information in it's place is the best solution and by doing so ,improves the Findability, thereby Usability is achieved alongwith good experience too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Prabhakar,

This is a very true finding.

Thanks

niminypiminy said...

Yes keeping things at right place matters a lot for a website.
When we’re designing pages, we tend to assume that users will scan the page, consider all of the available options, and choose the best one. Users don’t read pages because it's not as pleasant to read online as offline. They scan them.
Users skim on the Web, rather than reading carefully.

Complexity or confusion make people go away.