One of the important challenges that App developers have faced is discoverability. How does one person actually find your app in a crowded app store? Actually, how does any content producer (writer, musician, etc) get their content found…
It is a big challenge and there are strategies that can be used to get found. It usually involves advertising…but not always.
Getting your information found on a search engine is easy if your content is really unique. The challenge is that if it is that unique is anyone actually looking for it. The problem is even if someone is interested in that content, they are unlikely to find it because they may not search for the information that way.
But I am not even talking about information that you post on a website that you hope some random person in the world wants to find, I am talking about the information that you keep in your organization that you are supposed to share and use with your colleagues. This is information that someone else in the organization actually needs to know about.
How do you make sure that someone else sees that information and takes the appropriate action at the appropriate time? You can do the obvious — make it big, make it colorful, make it flash or pop up, etc., but that still doesn’t mean that people will notice it or internalize it the way that you meant.
This is a bit like the dilemma that a webmaster faces when everybody in the organization wants there information at the top of the page. Not all the information can be on the top of the home page and you really can’t force some to scroll or click.
All information is edited, censored, doubted and ignored. Even important information that everybody should, in theory, know about suffers from this syndrome. Ultimately, information processing is still up to the individual.
The social media algorithms kind of act like an information concierge pushing information in front of you that it thinks (based on your past behavior and preferences) you want to see. The problem with the algorithm is that it has a hard time showing information that could be useful that you do not want to see.
When we work in the same organization with the same goals, sometimes you have to see information that you don’t want to see.
A personal information concierge that circles around the organization gathering information and distributing it to those who need to see it at the appropriate time (not interrupting flow, but not getting information there too late) would be an interesting function.
