Avoiding the findability treasure hunt

You have great content on your website, it’s so good it’s like treasure. But treasure is only valuable if people can find it. You want your users to discover that content easily, not have to hunt it out.

Findability is one of the foundations of good user experience. In the classic UX Honeycomb, it can be described simply as “Content is easily located”. That sounds like a low bar, but achieving it takes thoughtful design. The structure of a website, the way information is organised and the choices presented to users all influence how easily they can find their way to what they need. 

UX Honeycomb

People don't generally read websites from top to bottom. They scan pages, looking for words, headings, links and other clues that tell them where to go next. Nielsen Norman Group found that 79% of users scan web pages rather than reading them word for word. That makes the way a website is structured and presented really important. If the navigation is confusing, headings aren't meaningful, links don't explain where they lead, or important information is buried under layers of content, users have to do more work to get where they want to go.

Good UX reduces the friction and always starts with understanding what people are actually trying to achieve, then designing the experience around those needs. Sometimes that means making navigation simpler or changing the way content is grouped. It might mean giving a page a clearer hierarchy, improving calls to action or making an important piece of information easier to spot. It can also mean removing things. A page with fewer, better choices can be much easier to navigate than one that tries to tell users everything at once (you don’t have to put everything on your homepage!).

This can be harder than it sounds because organisations tend to structure websites around how they see themselves. Departments, services, internal terminology and organisational hierarchies can all seem perfectly logical to the people who work there. They aren't necessarily logical to someone who has arrived on the website for the first time and simply wants to find out how to apply for something, contact the right person or understand a service.