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Ravi Mynampaty

Senior Web Technologist, Harvard Business School

Biography

Ravi Mynampaty

Ravi Mynampaty is an experienced software engineer who has been leading search projects at Harvard Business School (HBS) for the past few years.

For an updated profile of Ravi, see his speaker profile for the J. Boye 11 conference in Philadelphia:

Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The school offers a full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive education programs. It owns Harvard Business School Publishing, which publishes business books, online management tools for corporate learning, case studies, and the monthly Harvard Business Review. It is ranked 1st among American business schools by the U.S. News & World Report and 3rd in the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings 2010, behind London Business School and The Wharton School at the The University of Pennsylvania. It is consistently ranked in the top ten of other national and global business school rankings, and is one of six Ivy League business schools.

Presentation

Developing Findability Standards

Case: Harvard Business School

Track: User experience
Conference Day #1, Wednesday November 3rd, 16.00-17.00

End-users of HBS Web sites, Intranet sites, and in-house software applications are currently faced with a multitude of individually designed ways to find information, particularly through different search UIs.  Diverse interfaces include varying content, and may be missing important content found elsewhere. There is no findability practices support system in place, nor are there formal response systems by which end-users may provide feedback.  This results in users not finding information they need—as is borne out by data from recent user research conducted at HBS.

To alleviate this problem and to support an effective findability experience, the HBS IM Team partnered with ITG and developed a set of core findability standards.  The standards are grouped by components such as the interface, the search technology, the content management/content creation processes, as well as the governance/management of the standards.  Adoption of these standards will make it easier for end-users of HBS content to discover or locate valuable information.

This presentation will outline the what, why, who, and how of these standards, i.e.,:

  • What Findability means in the HBS context
  • Why the standards were needed
  • Who will be using the standards
  • How the standards were developed
  • How the standards are being rolled out

See slides online