Designing Tag Navigation

Slide 1: Desiging Tag Navigation November 2007

Slide 2: James Kalbach Human Factors Engineer LexisNexis Information Architect Razorfish Germany (2003) Library & Info Science Degree Rutgers University Designing Web Navigation (O‘Reilly, Aug 2007)

Slide 3: Metadata

Slide 4: The Navigation Layer “ [Filters] help people move from the world they know (“hits”) to the world they don’t (“niches”)… ” “ Soon everything will make it to the market and the real opportunity will be sorting it all out. ”

Slide 5: 1. Owner-Created Metadata Pros • Consistent terms • Comprehensive Cons • Time intensive to create • Maintenance • Inflexible, rigid Example: Controlled Vocabulary

Slide 6: 2. Technically Generated Metadata Cons Pros • Can be inaccurate • Scales up • Performance intensive • Quick, timely • High cost to enter • Inexpensive to run Examples: Entity Extraction

Slide 7: 3. User-Generated Metadata Pros • Low maintenance • Self-generating organization • Low costs to get started • OK for an answer Cons • Lacks comprehensiveness • Requires incubation time • Navigating other's tags difficult Example: Tagging

Slide 8: Tagging ≠ Tag Cloud

Slide 9: Tagging Process Why do people tag? • Re-find something of value • Share a resource or object with others Three key stages of tagging 1. Creating tags 2. Using and managing your own tags 3. Using other people’s tags

Slide 10: 1. Creating Tags

Slide 11: Encourage Tagging Make it easy to tag

Slide 14: Prompt for Tags Help people find words to use

Slide 16: Tag Form Avoid space-separated tags Newyearseveparty2007 iphone_review to-read Use comma-separated

Slide 18: 2. Navigating Your Own Tags

Slide 19: Provide Different Views Let people navigate in different ways

Slide 21: Navigate Resources Allow people to search their resources

Slide 22: Combine Tags Allow people to combine two tags

Slide 23: 3. Navigating Other People‘s Tags

Slide 24: Enhance Tag Clouds Show context and provide structure

Slide 26: Mix Metadata Expose other types of relevant metadata

Slide 28: Show Tags for Resource Expose tags at the resource-level

Slide 29: Link to Other People Browse the resources of other members

Slide 30: Conclusions Tagging offers an alternative to top-down classification Tags are still just another type of metadata Tagging doesn’t necessarily mean using a tag cloud Understand the broader tagging context People must be able to navigate tags effectively In designing a tagging system, three stages are critical: 1. Creating tags 2. Navigating your own tags 3. Navigating the tags of others

Slide 31: Thank You www.ExperiencingInformation.com James.Kalbach@LexisNexis.com