Hot answers tagged tags
16
In What Drives Content Tagging: The Case of Photos on Flickr (Nov, Naaman, Ye, 2008), content tagging by a random sample of Flickr users is analysed:
We contacted a random sample of users, selected
from a page of photos uploaded recently to Flickr, and
emailed 1373 users an invitation to participate in the webbased survey. A total of 237 valid ...
14
Nielsen says: "Tag clouds were a huge fad in 2009, and have actually been a fad for several years. Even so, usability studies show that most normal users don't know what they are and don't know how to deal with them."
Although he doesn't link to any studies, I tend to believe him. Tag clouds are hard to understand and hard to process visually.
If it's a ...
14
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag
Hashtags are mostly used as unmoderated ad-hoc discussion forums; any combination of characters led by a hash sign is a hashtag, and any hashtag, if promoted by enough individuals, can "trend" and attract more individual users to discussion using the hashtag.
The tag you are talking of in this context is a ...
12
What to call them depends on use; "tags" in scientific or other publications are more often called keywords (but are used as Index Terms) and are often the actual topics or important words in an article rather than meta tags. For example Barack Obama is a good keyword, politics is more like a tag or category.
Tags are handy in that they give a visual ...
11
...Maybe we should just say 'synonym', flat-out. It isn't that space-consuming, and at least it's unambiguous.
I'd also use a 'branch' structure, greyed text and italics to mark a synonym entry as 'secondary' to the main entry. Consider this example:
Ok, so java isn't actually a synonym of javascript, but you get my gist.
10
The idea behind tags is the same as the idea behind labels in GMail: the ability to assign multiple tags to a single post/mail/.../item.
The GMail labeling of e-mails was born specifically to counter the need in most e-mail clients to archive an e-mail in a single specific folder which ususally would be part of a hierarchy of folders. So what do you do with ...
10
I notice that the answers cover a slightly different field from what was asked in the comment by JonW:
Really, what I'm interested in is whether or not people know what they can do with tags after they've already been assigned - such as browsing the site using tags to find related content, as opposed to just tagging content with relevant tags.
so ...
9
Partly to do with the likely matching lower case of the word when found embedded in the relevant content.
Partly to provide a consistent nature to the tags without seeming to give any one tag preferential treatment or any sense of importance that is not due.
Partly to remove a layer of complication when creating, defining, exposing, using, sharing, ...
9
When the description has a hashtag, automatically add a corresponding number of tag buttons to the right of the row. Those will take the user to the results of the search query for "#Lunch" or "#clients" for example.
As soon as the user adds/removes the hashtag to or from the description, the tag button gets added to or removed from the right hand side.
...
8
I had this exact problem about a year ago, and ended up doing a number of interviews to try work out whether it was clearer. What I found is by no means definitive, it is just sharing my experience.
We found that most people in our target group understood the concept of tags. A few understood them better as 'labels', which it seems they got from gmail. ...
8
As mentioned in Smashing UX Design by Jesmond Allen and James Chudley of cxpartners, who have many years of experience with high profile retail website, they recommend using tabs in this way with caution as in usability testing they find that people don't always see the tabs.
Tabs typically differentiate unconnected groups of items. Compartmentalizing items ...
7
I love the way Delicious handles this
this is an 'AND' only search however. So if you want to search for 'tag1 AND tag2' OR 'tag3 AND tag4 AND tag5', you just search twice :)
I don't remember seeing a tag search that you want, but this is how I would take a crack at it,
I'm assuming your user base is fairly tech-savvy here. Some search engines have ...
7
I would say that one of the main benefits of tags in my opinion is that you can click on them and see other items associated with the same tag. If they are really not clickable then perhaps the best thing is to display them as a comma separated list of words/terms, perhaps in a mid grey (or other suitable faded) foreground colour in order to separate them ...
7
I think of the StackOverflow tagging method as being good for programmers. I mean, it's kind of unnatural, but there are technical advantages. And programmers are used to all sorts of weird things in place of spaces.
The - in the tags is technically convenient for a couple reasons:
The - can be used in the URL neatly and reliably shared by email ...
7
Many good answers, here are my thoughts:
Why is it that users don't understand tags or/and don't know the difference between tags and categories? I think it's because tagging is quite an abstract idea and not really applicable in the real world.
So instead of trying to find the correct term, I'd try to tell the user what it is in "real world language". ...
5
I think the interface looks fine.
I think you are too loose in what you offer your users with the ability to tag. Everything isn't a tag. A lot of these options seem mutually exclusive. A song's era is basically in and around its release date -- songs created in the 1920's are always going to be 1920's songs and that's never going to change. A song has ...
5
I think this is one of those cases where there is no correct answer. It will depend on your context and target audience.
As Steve says space works with Stack Overflow because programmers are used to separating keywords by spaces. You see the system break down when you get to the sites used by non programmers (and even on Stack Overflow itself occasionally) ...
5
We have an application that helps you track how much money you spend on healthcare. You can tag your expenses; in our application, we call the tags "category tags". The context-sensitive help reads:
Tags are just words or phrases that you can use to help categorize
your health spending. Tags can be anything: names of family members,
names of ...
5
My immediate inclination is that the slightly fuzzy edged search or navigation facility provided by the tags concept is not likely to fit well in the context of the precise nature of the world of accounting or resource planning. The user model seems slightly at odds with the more unstructured tags concept which more suits a changing environment.
The good ...
5
Use the Faceted Navigation pattern. Amazon.com does a great job with it:
(screenshot from these search results for Nintendo DS - note that you can keep yours shorter if you have a vertical constraint)
Some things of note:
Very clear communication on what the currently selected item in each facet is (in this case, black bold vs. blue for links)
Great ...
5
There are a number of ways you can probably display (and remove) tags, and I guess quantity is probably the tipping point about how you want to arrange them. It's normally the case that the tags are metadata and therefore, it would probably be something you want to avoid giving too much prominence to.
One good way of doing things would be to take a mixture ...
5
One way to guide the user would be to style the tags as soon as the users finish typing a tag, thus indicating that the application/system has recognized their tag.
For example, when the user types in the tags that you have entered for this question i.e. "user-behavior", "tags", "warnings", this is what people typically do.
Instead, try the following. ...
5
A tags primary use is to place content in context, which means they are labels first and foremost. In real life we use tags all the time to label things to its belongings. Take a suitcase on an airport, it has at least two tags; (1) The suitcase destination airport and (2) the suitcase owners home address. These tags place the suitcase in context of ...
4
So I walk into a coffee shop and I look down the list of options, but before I finish reading I get asked what I would like. I say "I'd just like a regular coffee please". The barista then asks me "Would you like that white or with milk?".
Huh - what!? White or with milk? It's the same thing - did you mean to ask whether I want it black or white?
Why ...
4
I find tag clouds to be rather distracting.
I can say that I have never clicked on one. I understand that the larger the tags are, the more popular they are, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well as the "Recent Tags" sidebar on this site, which displays a count next to the tag, and lists them in an easily scannable list. To me, tag clouds are just ...
4
I'd do something like this:
[book description]
this book relates to: [tag] [tag] [tag]
Please note, English is not my native language, so I'm not sure those are the correct words. However a label like that wouldn't need explanations (tooltips), and if tags have a "clicky" look I'm sure it's safe and tempting for a user to click it and see what it ...
4
Tags should fit in the following sentence:
This item is about _________.
This simple and useful guideline came from UXExchange, the precursor of ux.stackexchange.com. (I came up with it, so of course I think it's useful.)
So "tagging" would be for an item about the process of tagging, "tags" would be for an item about the actual tags themselves, and ...
4
~5k tags are far too confusing for any users so it is sure that without a search field it would be almost impossible to handle
You should use a general search field (just like in YouTube) and maybe add among filter options ('Search among tags'). But if your built-in search engine is clever enough the results would be much more relevant to the search term if ...
4
Thinking different
I would like to answer this from another angle, as I feel the straight up answer has already been given. The question implies that users are alone and responsible of their own content like this system was some unattended SharePoint Intranet. But it's not.
On all StackExchange sites, and on Wikipedia (which also uses tags) there are ...
4
I'm pretty convinced normal users don't know what to do with tags per se.
The only really common place for tagging is Facebook - Google for 'do people understand what to do with tags' and 9 out of 10 first page links are all facebook related.
With facebook no-one really thinks about searching for a tag - because the tag is just a person. So you're ...
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