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Business Owner Interview Questions for Internal Findability Audit

Note: This is a companion document to the “Developing Findability Standards” slides

http://www.slideshare.net/mynampaty/developing-findability-standards

The Harvard Business School (HBS) Information Management (IM) team asked the following questions of

business owners of various web/intranet properties across HBS in the process of developing current

state and desired future of search/findability at HBS. The questions are divided into sections , one each

for five of the six components of findability in the context of HBS Websites, Intranet sites, and software

applications which have search functionality, plus the two introductory sections A and B. The sixth

component, “Search Engine” was not included in this questionnaire since that is a back-end piece which

the IM team was very knowledgable about. For more information on the findability components and

how the standards were developed, please see the above mentioned slides.

A. Search UIs 1. What are the search UIs over which you have oversight?

B. For each search UI please provide us with the following information: 1. What is the overall business purpose /objective of this UI? (need to understand overall user

interaction, what is current/desired, what improvements are needed)

a. Does search add value to your organization either monetarily or in terms of opportunity

cost?

2. What do you know of the current specific behaviors of users of this UI? Please provide use case

examples. (alum is looking for a job, experts in particular industry)

3. What do you know of the desired specific behaviors of users of this UI? Please provide use case

examples. (things they want to do but cannot right now, e.g., search by particular fields, take some

action such as saving to a file)

Now onto more specific questions re: users, UI, content, creators, and search Management/Support.

Quickly answer if relevant, we can skip if they are not relevant.

C. Users 1. What information do you collect about your users? How often do you collect this information?

2. What mechanisms do you use to collect? E.g., surveys, focus groups, etc.?

3. How do you use the information you collect?

4. How do you segment your users?

a. demographics,: Income, age, gender, culture, language

b. Audience type: role, faculty/staff/students,

c. Psychographics: values, attitudes, lifestyles (travel, busy, MBA )

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d. Technographics: tech platforms, mac vs. pc, mobile users, browsers

e. Digital literacy: how savvy are your search users

f. Domain literacy : how much they know about a subject

5. What is the domain expertise of your users? What assumptions or knowledge do you have about

their familiarity with the content being searched?

6. Do you need to meet the needs of both experts and laypersons? How do you do that?

7. What is the search experience of your users? E.g., novice, advanced (regardless of their domain

expertise.)

8. What type of devices/interfaces do your users use? E.g., laptop, mobile, kiosk? Which ones take

priority?

9. What are your users’ search behavior patterns? Can you tell from analytics if visit time, bounce rate,

conversion rate, etc.

10. Are your users known-item searchers or exploratory?

11. Do your users care more about finding only relevant results (precision) or all the results (recall)?

12. Do you tune search in any way? E.g., how do you balance precision/recall in your search function?

D. Interface 1. Is UI optimized to the goals of the users? How is this determined?

E. Content 1. What are the kinds of content being indexed for search? E.g., HTML, documents, digital objects?

2. What are the content access structures being used by Search?

3. Do you have processes in place to get rid of redundant, obsolete, and trivial content (ROT)? What

are they?

4. What types of repositories do you pull content from?

F. Creators 1. What roles in your organization are formally tasked with creating content which is being searched

via this UI?

2. How do you motivate them to improve quality and quantity of the content?

3. How do you enlist users in content creation and organization?

4. What training do you provide?

5. What guidance exists for the informal sharing of content?

6. How do you share analytics to encourage use and co-creation of content? All samples welcome.

G. Search Management/Support 1. Which roles manage the successful outcome for:

a. Users

b. UI

c. Search Engine

d. Content

e. Creators

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f. The whole experience

2. What are their responsibilities?

3. What are the metrics for success?

4. Which analytics matter most in making management decisions?

5. Which analytics packages do you use? What is working? What is not?

6. Who is responsible for overseeing the search design, and the relationship between search designs?

7. Who is responsible for obtaining funding for the search design and the overall search designs?

8. How are priorities made with respect to investing or not investing in search development, search

changes, search purchases?

9. How are you set up to support Search?