I have an interesting problem that pertains to UX. I have a QA website for doctors who specialise in respiratory medicine. It's a Rails app and I use the acts as taggable gem for user interests tags and for question topic tags. That way I can easily search for questions that pertain to the users specialist interest. These tags are quite specific - they really drill down on small topics (and interests). But when a user first signs up I want to present him/her with a small modal asking for their interests so before they get started I can already give them some tailored content. Here lies the issue.....bear with me:

The tags are specific like:

Pulmonary nodules Lung cancer Mesothelioma

These are all related to the concept of "pulmonary oncology". You'd never ask a new user if they are interested in pulmonary nodules (it's too specific) but you'd definitely have "pulmonary oncology" as a broad topic. What I need is some kind of hierarchy where all the specific topics fall under perhaps 6-7 key over-arching headings. I thought that maybe I could allow the user to, in this case, select pulmonary oncology but under the hood, I'd add all the related tags to their profile. But then they end up with all these interests in their profile that they didn't specifically select - they selected pulmonary oncology. I don't want to tinker with the acts as taggable gem - I want to leverage this gem to do all the lifting when getting tailored feeds for user etc. is this a bad user experience - to automatically select interests for them based on their expressed "general interests"?

I hope I have explained this correctly.

I have an interesting problem that pertains to UX. I have a QA website for doctors who specialise in respiratory medicine. It's a Rails app and I use the acts as taggable gem for user interests tags and for question topic tags. That way I can easily search for questions that pertain to the users specialist interest. These tags are quite specific - they really drill down on small topics (and interests). But when a user first signs up I want to present him/her with a small modal asking for their interests so before they get started I can already give them some tailored content. Here lies the issue.....bear with me:

The tags are specific like:

Pulmonary nodules

Lung cancer

Mesothelioma

These are all related to the concept of "pulmonary oncology". You'd never ask a new user if they are interested in pulmonary nodules (it's too specific) but you'd definitely have "pulmonary oncology" as a broad topic. What I need is some kind of hierarchy where all the specific topics fall under perhaps 6-7 key over-arching headings. I thought that maybe I could allow the user to, in this case, select pulmonary oncology but under the hood, I'd add all the related tags to their profile. But then they end up with all these interests in their profile that they didn't specifically select - they selected pulmonary oncology. I don't want to tinker with the acts as taggable gem - I want to leverage this gem to do all the lifting when getting tailored feeds for user etc. is this a bad user experience - to automatically select interests for them based on their expressed "general interests"?

I hope I have explained this correctly.