Designing Tag navigation

James Kalbach, LexisNexis

• Metadata: Owner-created (controlled vocabulary), technically generated (search-generated), user-generated (tagging). Which to use is situational; each has pros and cons
• tagging != tag cloud; there are other ways to present it
• Why do people tag? 1: to find stuff for themselves 2: To share with others
• 3 stages of tagging: creating tags; using and managing your own tags; using other peoples tags
• UIs need to encourage tagging for it to work; make the field (a) visible, and (b) large if you want rich and abundant tags (Which you do)
• make suggestions for tags
• provide multiple views onto tags – favourite, recent, popular
• don’t make tags be the only way of searching for resources
• allow of combinations of tags (e.g. del.icio.us related tags)
• allow slicing+dicing: grouped tag clouds
• Good tag-driven sites: LibraryThing; Buzzilions;
• tag clouds are inaccessible unless they include some kind of textual indicator of the number of tags rather than just relying on fontsize

Chris May : 07 Nov 2007 15:25 |  Tags: Web20Expoberlin |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem