New Equation for Findability
The bottom line is that dynamic on-line information is exploding and digital natives want to contribute and have a choice in filtering and managing it, while digital immigrints may find traversing this digital river of information a daunting task. These challenges are not mutually exclusive and will require a specific information access strategy to be established in order to deliver the best user experience.
Why Findability?
Creating a compelling information access experience for people visiting your site is imperative. It sets the tone for your online interaction. A good experience will likely lead to additional page views and visits. A poor experience will lead to a lost visitor—potentially never to return. Findability on your site is that important. Failure to find something you know exists can be personally annoying but can be disastrous for your website. Finding hidden information and relationships, e.g., helping your users mastering discovery, is essential to the success of your website.
Keyword search can be a starting point for accessing information on the Web and may suffice for simple information retrieval requirements. However, keyword search requires significant added personal effort to achieve reasonable results for discovery applications. Search returns huge quantities of false positives and rarely returns comprehensive results even when the false positives are eliminated.
Keyword search alone is inefficient and insufficient. Ultimately, people want the flexibility to either search or browse. Relational navigation seamlessly combines keyword search and navigation. It allows people to see the full scope of information available, narrow (by keyword search or navigation) to a relevant result set, and then find and follow relationships to discover additional information they didn’t already know.
Have you ever felt like the more access to information you have, the more difficult decision making has become? Companies spend billions of dollars every year to improve the generation, access, management and archive of structured and unstructured content, all in the name of improved productivity. But have these improvements truly improved findability?
With relational navigation, people do not need to guess how to ask for information they need (like they do with keyword search) because relevant content is presented for them to explore. They immediately get a sense of all the content that is available on a particular topic. Relational navigation is the perfect marriage between the "bird’s eye" perspective and "bug’s eye" view. Increasing findabilty through content analytics and intuitive visualizations...it’s the winning equation.
Siderean Customer Story: Spend Matters
Spend Matters is an independently owned website providing news, information and commentary about "spend management"—the strategies, technologies and tactics companies use to manage operational expenditures. The site was an early pioneer in using the blog format to reach a business audience, and quickly gained a loyal following among purchasing and procurement departments in companies of all sizes. The site is supported by corporate sponsorships and advertising, with more than 100,000 unique visitors a month.
From Blog to Information Hub
As a blog, Spend Matters reflected the opinions and reporting of founder and chief blogger Jason Busch. The daily collection of posts referenced analyst reports, trade journals, conference presentations, mainstream news items, corporate white papers and press releases, as well as other blogs. This breadth of information was part of the site’s appeal, with topics ranging from the effect of global trade policies on manufacturing sourcing strategies to a detailed review of a major software vendor’s latest release. By reading a blog post, a visitor to the site might discover something new that would be helpful in their job.
Like most blogs, Spend Matters could be searched based on keywords or topics. Anything more sophisticated was out of the question. As readership grew at a double-digit monthly rate, the demands to provide more content and value for those readers also grew. To keep readership growing—essential for driving increased sponsorship and advertising rates—the site needed a way to stay current with a vast and ever-increasing network of information. And with more information would come the need for new and innovative ways to navigate through all that information.
The New Site
Spend Matters soon embraced a bold vision to become a one-stop information hub for all things related to spend management. To achieve this vision, Spend Matters turned to a solution based on Siderean’s Seamark Navigator. The new site:
- Enhances traditional blog postings with a sophisticated tool for flexible navigation and discovery;
- Aggregates content about spend management from more than 37 distributed, heterogeneous sources; and
- Allows users to make the site their own personal research tool by saving frequently used concepts, sources, and results for repeated reference.
Information has always been valuable when someone makes a purchasing decision, let alone hundreds or thousands of them on behalf of a company. Realizing this, Spend Matters, with Siderean’s help, went from being a well-trafficked blog to become something much more valuable for the core audience of spend management executives and managers. Relational navigation saves time, and brings relevant information to a reader’s fingertips that they might not otherwise discover.
That information can affect purchasing decisions, enhance negotiations with suppliers, minimize risk and ultimately help companies save money.
Siderean Software, Inc. helps people master discovery by quickly viewing and exploring the full scope of enterprise and Web-based information available for better informed decision making. Going beyond search, Siderean illuminates previously unseen relationships that help users discover new avenues of exploration and "lets you know what you don’t know" while navigating from a "bird’s-eye" to a "bug’s-eye" view. Founded in 2001, Siderean is backed by leading investment firms Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures.
For more information about Siderean or to find out how your corporation can gain the benefits of relational navigation, please visit www.siderean.com