[Sigia-l] Findability

[Laura Norvig]

Boniface Lau wrote:
>  > I'm working with a financial services company on an extranet for
>>  institutional investment clients. These folks' interest is in
>>  efficiency.  They'd _much_ rather click on links that take them to
>  > the latest research reports than have to enter search queries.
>


George Olsen responded:

>In data access terminology, navigating through a maze is "sequential
>access"; retrieving through a search mechanism is "random access".
>Care to guess which access method is more efficient?


On some of our sites we use "pre-searched topics". The user doesn't 
have to struggle to guess what keywords we assign to items. A live 
search is performed so we don't miss any new items and don't have to 
update any static pages. There's still the matter of how to arrange 
the topics, if you have a lot of them, but we don't have that many. 
We present them under broad categories all on one page, so user also 
does not have to navigate a "maze".

But I do think choice of the word "maze" shows bias. For *some* types 
of content (discrete and with unambiguous labels) nested hierarchies 
CAN work without leaving the user feeling lost.

-Laura N.