WINE™ — Website Intelligence Navigation System

WINE™ began with an idea that came out of building the Forecura website. Most websites contain far more information than a visitor will ever discover. The information is there, but finding the right connection at the right moment is often left entirely to the visitor. We still rely on menus, search, links and categories, and while these work well when someone already knows what they are looking for, they are much less effective when someone is exploring a subject and does not yet know where the next useful piece of information might be.

The original idea was developed within Forecura as HINE™, the Health Intelligence Navigation System. Forecura brings together a broad range of ideas, technologies and capabilities, and I wanted the website to reflect the same connected thinking. Rather than treating every page as an isolated destination, HINE was designed to help visitors discover relationships between the different things they were exploring. The experience was called Insight Sparkles™, and the response to it has been very encouraging.

What became clear through the Forecura implementation was that the underlying idea was not limited to healthcare. Almost every organization with a substantial website has the same challenge. A technology company may have products, research, documentation and customer stories. A university may have courses, faculty, research and publications. A professional services firm may have expertise, people, industries and thought leadership. A healthcare organization may have services, clinicians, research and educational material. The information exists, but the relationships between those pieces of information are not always easy for a visitor to discover.

That led to WINE™, the Website Intelligence Navigation System. WINE takes the thinking behind HINE and makes it applicable to websites across industries. The basic idea is straightforward. WINE looks at the content and context of a website and identifies meaningful relationships between its pages, ideas, products, services, research, resources and other information. When a relevant connection exists, the visitor can be shown an Insight Sparkle that provides an opportunity to explore that connection.

The visitor remains completely in control. WINE does not replace the website's existing navigation and it does not require the visitor to learn a new way of using the site. It simply introduces another opportunity for discovery. Someone reading an article may discover a related product. Someone exploring a product may discover a case study. Someone reading research may discover an associated service or another piece of content that provides useful context. The connection appears when it is relevant, and the visitor decides whether to follow it.

I deliberately wanted Insight Sparkles to be subtle. I did not want to create another recommendation system that fills a website with boxes, links and prompts. The purpose is not to show visitors more information simply because more information is available. The purpose is to help them discover something that is genuinely connected to what they are already exploring. If there is no useful connection, the system should remain quiet.

That principle is probably the most important part of WINE. Good website intelligence should not be measured by how many recommendations it produces. It should be measured by whether the connections it presents are useful. The experience should feel natural enough that visitors do not need to think about the technology behind it. They simply come across something interesting or useful while they are exploring the website.

Traditional website navigation is largely based on structure. Companies organize information into pages, sections and menus and expect visitors to move through that structure. WINE adds another dimension by looking at relationships. A visitor might begin with one idea, discover another related concept, move to a product or service, find a case study and then arrive at research that gives the original subject greater context. That journey does not have to be predetermined. It can emerge naturally from the relationships within the website.

This is what I find most interesting about the concept. A website already contains a considerable amount of knowledge, but the visitor often sees only the small part that brought them there. WINE is intended to make more of that knowledge discoverable without making the website more complicated to use. It is about bringing the right connection into view rather than asking the visitor to search for it.

The transition from HINE to WINE is therefore quite deliberate. HINE was created specifically for the Forecura environment and reflected the idea of Health Intelligence Navigation. Insight Sparkles became the visible expression of that thinking. WINE takes the underlying technology and experience and makes it broader, so that the same approach can be used by organizations in many different industries.

I am now looking at WINE as a MitroLabs product rather than simply a feature of the Forecura website. The intention is to extract the reusable technology from the existing HINE implementation, generalize it and make it available as a lightweight product that can be added to an existing website without requiring a complete redesign or redevelopment.

The initial commercial model is deliberately simple. WINE is planned as an inexpensive subscription per website per year product, making it very viable for a company to try without a major technology decision. Organizations that need more involved content analysis, customization, implementation or ongoing optimization can work with MitroLabs separately. This allows the product to remain accessible while creating an opportunity for deeper engagements where the website and information environment are more complex.

Forecura remains an important part of the story because this did not begin as a theoretical product. HINE was developed because there was a real problem to solve on the Forecura website, and Insight Sparkles were put into use. The positive feedback from that experience provided the confidence to take the underlying idea beyond healthcare and develop it as a broader website technology.

For me, the most interesting part of WINE is not the visual Sparkle itself. The Sparkle is simply the point at which the visitor notices a useful connection. The larger idea is that websites can move beyond being collections of pages and become more connected environments where information can reveal its relationships naturally.

I see WINE as a small but meaningful step in that direction. The website continues to work the way people expect, the visitor remains in control, and the existing content remains the foundation. The difference is that the website can now help reveal some of the connections that were already there but may otherwise have remained hidden.