Mooers's law

Mooers's law, from the information scientist Calvin Mooers in 1959, says: an information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for them not to have it. The point is not that the system is hard to search. It's that knowing the answer creates work, risk or blame.

#How it works

Information comes with obligations. Once you know something, you have to read it, act on it, or explain why you didn't. If those costs are higher than the cost of not knowing, people quietly stop looking:

• A dependency scanner reports 600 vulnerabilities, most irrelevant. The team mutes it, because opening the report means owning every finding in it.
• A dashboard shows a metric getting worse. Nobody opens it before the quarterly review, because seeing it means having to fix it.
• An alert fires dozens of times a day. People filter it to a folder they never read.
• A design wiki is complete and accurate, but checking it means discovering your approach was already rejected.

In each case the tool works. The incentive around it doesn't.

#Making information worth having

• Cut the noise first. A scanner that shows ten reachable, ranked findings gets used; one that shows six hundred gets switched off.
• Make every item actionable. An alert should mean someone needs to act now; anything else belongs on a dashboard. The incident response lesson covers paging only on symptoms users feel.
• Route it to an owner. Information that lands on "everyone" is owned by no one.
• Don't punish the finder. If discovering a problem gets you blamed for it, people stop discovering problems.