Discoverability

Our corporate websites are large and complex, and serve a highly varied audience. A key requirement is effective discoverability: general discoverability for people exploring, but also specific discoverability to help people find what they are looking for quickly and easily.

General discoverability

General discoverability is for the instance where a user doesn’t have a specific action in mind. This can be:

• a general exploration of our site
• they’ve finished the content they came on the site to read and we want to keep them engaged
• they’re looking at a specific page that links off to a number of child pages
• they’re looking at a section of the site and we want to give them options for different things they can look at

There are a number of components that can be used for general discoverability, some like our Cards have similar functions but differing designs. A key part of these components is that they have the right priority within the page. Sometimes it's the key next step we want someone to take, so they should be bold. Other times these are just potential actions that we don’t want to push too much visually.

When creating pages you should think about the potential links, which are most important and select the components that match this hierarchy with their visual prominence.

Specific discoverability

Specific discoverability is for users that have a specific goal in mind. This is often a singular audience wanting a key piece of information.