Discoverable? Really??

I figure that we’ve now entered into a phase of the Internet where people find things by one of two routes. Either you know where you want to be, in which case you either enter the URL directly into a browser, or type a company or organisation name into a search engine (or, in some cases, you type the URL into a search engine); alternatively, you have a question, in which case you type that (or some words pertaining to that) into a search engine and then rely on the search engine logic to bring back something sensible.

Let’s take an example. I want to travel to Newcastle.

If I type “I want to travel to Newcastle” into Bing, the top result is for local travel information for Newcastle and the North East, second is Newcastle City Council’s pages on sustainable travel, and third is the BBC’s travel pages for the city.

Do the same on Google, and I get three adverts for airlines offering me fares to fly to Newcastle, followed by a travel aggregator offering me a choice of fares, followed by the Newcastle and Gateshead tourist board.

All of these options can help me solve my dilemma of how I might be able to travel to Newcastle.

Now let’s try that same search in the “discoverable” world of app stores…

First iOS (and I’m indebted to my friends on Twitter for this):

Hmm. Discoverable my ar…

Next up – the Android marketplace: I just wish I could take a screen shot to share with you the random list of books that that search brings up (starting with “An Ordinary Woman”, and quickly getting to “An introduction to modern financial reporting theory”). But no apps were returned.

Does the Windows Phone marketplace give anything more useful? Well, in terms of finding apps: no. No results found. But at least by then pressing the Search button it takes the search term and does an Internet search against Bing.

So, do apps marketplaces give discoverability to apps? Well, yes. If you know specifically what it is that you are looking for then possibly. But no, not at the moment, if you have a question for which you are looking for a solution. There seems to me to be a huge opportunity here…

Anyone who has worked with me in recent years will probably have heard me tell the story of Dave the Electrician at some point (see here for a highly abridged version). Too often the world of IT starts with the assumption that people know what they want, and that our job is to provide it for them. Actually, hang that. Too often people in general believe that their job is to provide the thing that people know they should be asking for.

Internet Search in the past few years has moved us forward in that it’s very often able to help us discover what it is we need – apps marketplaces still have a long way to go by the look of it. They need to be able to help us answer questions rather than just finding things that we already know we want.

 

(A big thanks to @markwilsonIT, @fintanmurphy and @lurkmoophy for helping with the “research” on this article).