Focus on the People, Not the Document/Information.

Over the course of a couple hours yesterday and one today, I sat through a deep dive into a web site redesign.  They wanted to refresh it, bring it up to speed (so that, for example, it does not show an old cell phone on the front page).  They had plans to update layout and navigation and organize the current information a bit better and bring in some new info.  After some prodding, I found out that the purpose of this redesign was to help people find information better and just to make it look more modern.

In the old version there was navigation and search to help users find information.  In the new, there was search and a redesigned navigation.  The improvement for find-ability was very incremental.  But if that is really the goal, we weren’t doing it.

We forget that there are more ways to find information.  Search.  Heirarchical navigation. Tagging. “Others who viewed this also viewed…” and other techniques.  Those are the technical ways.  But we can’t forget that one of the best ways to find information is through PEOPLE.  I know – weird concept, but it works.  Link people together and they will find the information that is not in a system.  Rather, it is in their heads, or their desk drawer on a piece of paper, or on a local hard drive, or in a book you didn’t know about, or it hasn’t been discovered until you and they put your heads together to discover it.

Right now more systems focus on information or documents.  What they should focus on is people since they are the ones who create the information. Focus on the people and the information will take care of itself.  As @dave said during #lrnchat tonight, “Biggest thing for lrng professionals in adopting soc learning is changing mindset – let learners share expertise #lrnchat.”  Enable that and you are golden.

Tagged as: people, search, tagging