Findability

Findability is the quality of being locatable: how easily people — and increasingly machines — can find a particular piece of information. Peter Morville, who popularized the term in Ambient Findability (2005), put the premise simply: you can't use what you can't find.

What findability depends on

Findability is the combined outcome of the systems of Information architecture:

• Organization — sensible groups: Taxonomy, Faceted classification
• Labels — words that match users' Mental models: Labeling systems
• Navigation — paths to the content: Navigation systems
• Search — which works only as well as the Metadata and Controlled vocabulary behind it

Measuring it

• Task success and time in Tree testing and usability tests
• Search analytics: zero-result queries, refinements, exits after search
• Support tickets that ask for information that already exists

Findability for machines

Search engines and AI assistants find content through structure: clear headings, stable URLs, structured data and explicit relations. A Knowledge graph or published schema.org markup makes documentation findable by software, not only by people.