Discoverability vs. Findability

First things first. discoverability and findability are not the same thing. Findable is relatively easy. You know something exists. You saw it once or someone told you about it. You know what you’re looking for, but you don’t know where it is. Like your car keys or that status dashboard. Discoverability, on the other hand, is about learning. You can only discover something once. The second time you see something you haven’t discovered it, you’ve found it. And that’s the key difference.

And that gets to the heart of the issue. Findability is important for the things you know you don’t know. You have a question and you want an answer. What’s the difference between merge sort and bubble sort? When is it better to use a micro-kernel based architecture instead of microservices? Search engines are great for that kind of thing. Put in your keywords and get the answer.

Discoverability, on the other hand, is about things you don’t know that you don’t know. And search engines are notoriously bad at that. Sure, you might get a better spelling or a search result might show you something related, but if you’re trying to find out how to use your microkernel architecture to process millions of queries per second you’re unlikely to find anything about how a distributed microservice might be a better choice. If you know a little bit more about the problem space you can use a search engine, but it’s harder. You need to change your thinking and search for architectural patterns, and then dig in from there. And that’s if you know the domain.

Or consider your IDE. Both VSCode the various JetBrains IDEs do a good job of both making it easy to find the functionality you’re looking for with hierarchical menus, context menus, and a search mechanism and the make it easy to discover keyboard shortcuts and related commands/options though advertising them and grouping things. Vim, on the other hand, has an OK search engine, butt if you don’t know what you’re looking for it’s almost impossible to discover.

So why should you care? You should care because it applies not just to IDEs and search engines, but also to libraries, APIs, and pub-sub systems. We talk to our customers/users a lot and understand what they want/need. We use that information to build the things that provide the most value to them. If there were more valuable things to build we’d build them instead. But unless our customers/users know about what we’ve done and use it then we’ve wasted time. Sure, you could assume that since they asked for it 3 months ago they’ll notice when it suddenly appears, but really, they’re busy to and probably won’t. So make it not just findable, but discoverable. How you make something discoverable is a different topic for later