As you can see from the above picture that shows the Facebook's diffusion in December 2010, Facebook is the most used and widespread adopted social network in the world. The secret of Facebook is simple: applying a key concept of information architecture (namely findability) to people, thus turning every single user into a human resource that can be found and shared. Turning the human experience into a resource is simply a revolutionary approach to the IT world. Every single bit of an human life has been reformulated in terms of resources, which is different from assets. In fact, an asset necessarily implies a job, a career, a working position, whereas resource is a broader concept that ranges over a great variety of possible contexts, from daily life to emotional life and so on, thus encompassing all possible aspects of a human life. Findability is another key aspect of this secret: surfing the web, in its essence, means simply looking for something. In the past, people used to surf the web to search for electronic resources (files, documents, images etc.). Now, Facebook offers the opportunity to search for other people, other human resources. This is something that cannot be overlooked if we want to understand the secret of Facebook's success.

Understanding the web user's psychology is a key aspect for the success or failure of an entire web site that hinges on a single concept or design. In all its forms, all the web architecture is based on the simple idea of search and find. This is something with a vast, metaphorical meaning that ranges over time, space and cultures. In an ancient, epic poem, the hero seek something to achieve an higher power or an intellectual revelation. As Vladimir Propp correctly pointed out in his seminal essay on fairy tales, searching is finding or, to a certain extent, it simply reveals the truly becoming of a man, his changing through the meaning of his whole existence that finally is clear and well-defined.

We're all searching for something, either in the real or in the web world. We're searching for something that satisfies our search criteria or, more broadly, the meaning of the search itself. It doesn't matter what we're searching for, but only the thing, the idea, the page, the file, the image that makes our research real. In the Silence of the lambs, the main character Hannibal Lecter says that what's important is what we seek. And we seek what we see every day.

For a site, it's not important to be high-ranked in search engine results. What is really important is satisfying the search criteria of our potential visitors. Further, it's important to have an efficient internal search system that allows our users to find what they're looking for. Even if you get an high page rank, you'll probably find out that you've very few visitors, at least when you compare the number of the actual visits to the number you originally wanted to get.

A user who finds something is more than a potential customer: he's almost a happy customer, just because he did find what he was searching for. Then all depends on your ability of turning a casual visitor into a devoted customer. Anyway, when a search ends, another one is just beginning. And on, and on, Since the very beginning of the web.

Interesting slides by Luca Rosati and Andrea Resmini (in Italian).

Architettura dell'informazione e user experience

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