Thursday, November 03, 2005
The Perfect Tagging UI
Enough whining. I'm going to try to be constructive by listing what are the behaviors that will make me fall in love with a tagging thingie:
- Clearly mark the tag boundaries
- Why? we still have a mess with different conventions regarding what separates tags - spaces, commas, semicolon, ... until we figure out it, we need a way to provide a visual hint to the user whether they got it right or wrong.
- Reasonable: Flock. Tags are comma-separated; whenever you type the comma, the previous tag is visually surrounded by a gray bubble indicating that it's a "single unit".
- Bad but not awful: Flickr. You can't tell as you type the tags if you got it right or wrong, but when you click the "Add" button, you get immediate visual feedback by inspecting the tags list above the entry line.
- Terrible: Zoundry (which other then this is a pretty cool product, I am using it to write this post :). You won't know if you did it right or wrong until you see your post
on the blog...
- Support copy and paste of tags
- there, and paste them here. Using a standard copy-and-paste interface, mind you.
- list, but selecting the tags in the list is hard, and pasting them results in a mess.
- Good: delicious.
- Auto-complete
- Why? I love tagging, they make life easier. I don't like typing, it makes life shorter.
- Reasonable: blinklist.
- Bad: RawSugar. The auto-suggest does not follow well with the typing process. I can't press enter to choose the currently selected auto-complete suggestion and then proceed to type the next tag. I am forced to leave my typing context to select the tag, and after it's selected, to use the mouse to move back to where I was in the tagging line.
- Auto-suggest
- Why? I'm not always in the mood to generate tags. Sometimes I am feeling lazy. Comeon, you know so much about me and about other users, use it to make my life easier, not just the search engine life :)
- Based on tags that I've often used together with the tags I've already typed
- Based on tags that other users often use together with the tags I've already typed
- Based on tags that other people who tagged this page used
- Good: delicious
- Bad: Flickr
- Why? I'm not always in the mood to generate tags. Sometimes I am feeling lazy. Comeon, you know so much about me and about other users, use it to make my life easier, not just the search engine life :)
- No hierarchy, classification, or anything else that disrupts the cognitive process
- Why? Because I find it distracting. And I have a good excuse for this :)
- Good: Flickr
- Bad: RawSugar
- Ability to edit tags like text
- Why? because I make typos and change my mind, and I want to be able to quickly go back during the tagging process (or later) and fix it
- Good: Flickr, Delicious. Though none of them makes it too easy to edit the tags once they are submitted.
- Bad: Flock. The visual bubble around the tags, which I mention in #1, really gets in the way when you see a typo in a tag you just typed and you want to fix it.
- Why? because I make typos and change my mind, and I want to be able to quickly go back during the tagging process (or later) and fix it
- Search previously tagged items with an already-typed tag without disrupting the tagging process
- Why? Because I'd like to borrow the tags I used when I tagged related items in the past
- Good: Flickr. Modless tagging interface, I can always open a new window and search.
- Bad: Flock (modal dialog...), Microsoft Live Favorites.
Funny, if you scan the "Bad:" examples, you'll note that the application that I am pretty much addicted to - Flickr - scores pretty high on the Bad list. Which kinda puts my rumbling in perspective :)
: Zoundry, delicious,favorites, flickr, flock,folksonomy, microsoft live,rawsugar, tag,
Looksmart leveraging Furl to create vertical search
Looksmart launched yesterday 161 new vertical web sites in 12 categories, apparently leveraging their Sep' 04 acquisition of Furl by using Furl users tagged bookmarks to discover and rank web pages relevant for a specific category / vertical.
I believe that they are the first major search engine company that truly leverages the tagging phenomena and integrates it with conventional search engine to deliver general purpose better search for the non-tagging public.
MS Live Favorites - almost, but not quite.
Windows Live Favorites is one of the many services introduced as part of the recently-announced Microsoft Windows Live suite (MS's new AJAX-based virtual desktop).
It's got rudimentary tagging support (called keywords. unlike Google, which calls them labels. well. it's always good to have a topic for flame wars...). Tag, search by tag. No tag cloud support. Tag bundle? Huh?
You can share your tagged favorites with the world. Hmm... that's a much as there is there in that area right now. No real community features there right now - can't see who else used this tag (I mean, keyword :), how many did that, what else did they tag with related tags, etc.
The tagging user interface is... hmmm... minimalistic :)
You can import your existing favorites from your browser (as long as its Internet Explorer, at least at this point). Nothing there about my favorite feature - synchronization between the desktop browser favorites and the online copy - but the entire desktop / live synchronization thing is supposed to be coming later. Instead, it got an "export to bookmarks.htm" feature, with a distinctive '96 smell.
No real leverage of tags across the entire suite. I can't search the entire suite - favorites, email, files, ...- using my tags.
No information yet about the APIs that this service will expose.
Looks like the giant is waking up, but it doesn't feel like they really dig what this is all about. But then, that was also the case with Internet Explorer 1.0 :)
And until it does, no real reason to switch away from your current favorite social bookmark thingie.
Toward a tagging standard
How come we still don't have a standard for associating tags with content?
We've got delicious and friends tagging entire web pages, and Technorati tagging blog posts. Flickr tags pictures. But how different are they really from each other in this aspect? Do we really need a propriety way to express the association of a piece of content with tags?
How's about something along the following lines:
Tag a piece of content:
<tagstd:tagged tagstd:scope="children" xmlns:tagstd="http://tagstd.org">
<taglist xmlns="http://tagstd.org">
<tag>tagging</tag>
<tag>folksonomy</tag>
</taglist>
<p>This is a long blurb about our favorite topics:</p>
<ul><li>tagging</li><li>taxonomy</li><li>web 2.0</li></ul>
</tagstd:tagged>
(scope="children" indicates that the tagged content is the children element of the tagged tag).
Tag a link (in fact, tag the resource that the link is pointing to):
<tagstd:tagged tagstd:scope="resource" xmlns:tagstd="http://tagstd.org">
<taglist xmlns="http://tagstd.org">
<tag>tagging</tag>
<tag>folksonomy</tag>
</taglist><a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/">Joho the Blog</a> </tagstd:tagged>
What do you think? Good? Bad? Reinventing the wheel?
Let me know.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
The scariest interface contest
Don't miss this wonderful contest on OK/CANCEL:
This week we'’re taking entries for the scariest interface youÂ’ve ever used. Leave a comment and a screenshot link. Feel free to show stuff that frightens you because of how it looks, works, or what it does. Then we'll '“interface your fears'” (har har) by talking about how to improve ‘em.
The person who has the scariest interface, or comes up with the best fix wins something cool.
How's about we do the same, leave a comment with a link to the tag-a-whatever web site (you can select from the ones listed in tag-o-verse 2.0 or come up with your own) with the most confusing and frustrating interface.
This might actually turn out to be a somewhat useful exercise...
What will you win? Don't know. Maybe a golden tag.
Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 ui userinterface contest worst
Post activation analysis paralysis
Scott Golder wrote (together with Bernardo A. Huberman) a while back a paper on "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems" (which I mentioned a while back).
Scott published his notes from Rashmi Sinha's session at TagCamp 2005 a few days ago. Rashmi Sinha, from Uzanto Consulting, posted about a month ago a wonderful piece on "A cognitive analysis of tagging". It's a must read.
Her main point is that the tagging process is so much more easy and natural then the classification process (e.g. organizing URLs or Pictures or whatever into hierarchies or folders based on a predefined categories), because it avoids what she calls "post-activation analysis paralysis":
"post activation analysis paralysis": A state of fear that you will make the wrong decision. And the item will be lost forever - it will land in some deep well, some hard to access branch of the tree and disappear from your view and attention.
Her analysis makes a lot of sense. If this is true, I think it's a good argument in favor of keeping the tagging process as simple as possible, and not to encumber it with facets, hierarchical tagging or anything else that makes that will pause that sub-conscious stream of tags from flowing. Hopefully we can avoid over-engineering the tagging process for a while, focusing instead on perfecting (and standardizing) the usability of the core tagging process.
Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 delicious search cognitive RashmiSinha hierarchy
facet classification
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Subscribe
