There’s many different ways to find something, and Peter Morville wants to help us improve our systems so this common task becomes easier for the user. Morville’s background in library science caused him to focus on findability issues in information architecture. Morville likes to think of the emerging discipline of information architecture as the balance of art and science.

Peter Morville has a background in library information science and is the author of O’Reilly’s Ambient Findability and the coauthor of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture or the World Wide Web (the widely acclaimed “Polar Bear” book).

Morville has realized that it’s importance to provide multiple paths to the same information.
Site search is still one of the biggest problems on the web. We need to better understand user queries, design search interfaces that are more obvious, do a better job of removing obsolete content, improve content meta data, and improve the results interface. Morville has found that often the second most used page on a site is the search results page, but this is rarely given much design consideration. Site search is a system, and we need to take a system-wide approach to improving it.

What does “usability” mean? Morville thinks it’s become a term that is synonymous with “quality” now and not so useful. The qualities we should be striving for are things like: useful, valuable, credible, usable, findable, desirable, and accessible. Our products and systems need to be pleasurable to use and incorporate all of these qualites in Morville’s “honeycomb” of terms, not just be usable.

Findability is the quality of being locatable or navigable, and “ambient” means surrounding, encircling, and enveloping. Morville defines “ambient findability” as “the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.” Acknowledging that this isn’t always necessarily a goal and privacy issues get raised, but this seems to be the direction we’re headed.

Morville put up a slide with a quote that is perfectly fitting with the Attention Economy theme of this year’s ETech. Attributed to Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon, the quote is:

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”

Morville’s favorite device to scare people about the future is a GPS watch that you can strap on to your child and which will automatically locate your child at any given time. Information Architects like this device for it’s breadcrumbing feature that shows routes taken, etc.

Morville wonders in a world of more and more and bigger and bigger haystacks, how are we going to make our needles bigger? He doesn’t think it’s going to be achieved with MS Bob or any of his offspring, data visualization tools, or maps, but rather by improved metadata — the revenge of the librarians! “Metadata has become sexy” claimed Morville to a chuckling crowd.