Information: Improving "Findability"

One of the things that most organizations have a challenge with is getting people to right information on, say, a website.

If you're going to a website, whether you're going to the Best Buy website or the Motorola website, or Target website, or whatever it might be, if you don't get to the precise information that you're looking for very quickly, most times you're just going to go someplace else. You might search a little bit and if you don't find the results, you move on. You'll go to another site.

So, many organizations are losing revenue, they're losing customers, they're losing opportunities by not having the information organized in the right way on their websites.

There's a couple of ways where taxonomy can help. You can help by, first of all, giving the user a very intuitive way to seek the information they need. And it's not a one-size-fits-all. It really depends on the user, the types of products and services, the types of things that they're interested in.

You can tune the navigational taxonomy. You can tune the terms and the navigational constructs to really fit it with what it is that user is trying to accomplish. That makes a tremendous improvement in usability of the website and reduces abandonment. So that's one piece of it, just the navigational constructs.

There actually are lots of ways of evaluating websites for best practices, and that’s something that we do a lot of work around.