User Experience Design: Tagging system and its UI design

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background: In a seminar on the collection of tag functions, the tagging of the meaning of the crowd was hotly discussed.
In order to structure the idea, close-up of this article is discussed separately: 1. is tag useful? ; 2. The advantages and disadvantages of the tagging; 3.tagging system and its UI design. more boring, is a knowledge point of the comb it.

1. is tag useful?

Tag is popular with web2.0 and has a history of 7 years (Keller, P. 2007). Tagging become a common feature of major websites, but are there many people who use it systematically? Tagging's mental burden is not light: it is not easy to classify information, not to describe the information itself. For a piece of information, should tag class or attribute? Should the category be wider or narrower? Tag the more the better, or control in a certain amount? Especially difficult is, because is not beforehand planning, not very well expected to be tagged content development, Getting started, maintenance is not easy.

But from the current situation of network development-- personal generated content (Bowen, pictures, video, etc.) quickly increased , all kinds of information mass influx to--tag can be described as a powerful tool to manage massive information. The 2nd part of this paper will discuss.

* Note: This article refers to the information is the image, video, audio and other resources, not only refers to the text information.

2. Advantages and disadvantages of tagging

2-1. Tag and tagging

· tag as metadata (metadata): Metadata is the so-called description of data/information data, tag is a user-created metadata, characterized by no hierarchy, customization .

· tagging constitutes a classification (folksonomy): The classification of the public, refers to the mass spontaneous use of tag to describe and classify information, the formation of the information Architecture and traditional classification (taxonomy) information organization. The difference is shown in table 1 below:

Table 1:taxonomy VS. Folksonomy

2-2. Tagging's benefit

Combined with table 1, the following benefits of tagging can be summed up:

· make information organizations more economical, efficient and flexible。
Asthe future is wet."The author says,"The only Group this can categorize Everything is everybody" (only everyone can classify all the information). As the Encyclopedia Britannica has in common with Wikipedia: The more information, the more obvious the disadvantage of the traditional classification-the development and maintenance costs only rise and fall; Based on the tagging, the use of the public power of the classification is the opposite. In particular, the current trend ispersonal Self-generated informationMore and more, the system classification, descriptive ability and efficiency can be said far less thanContent CreatorItself.

· Richer Index and description of information。
(1) tag is not as strict as the traditional classification of the control List (thesaurus), but because the information can beinfinitely many peopleGiveinfinitely Many tags, so the vast network of the sea as long as there is a person with the description you think, search is more organic to get. It may be more difficult to use the specialized words in the Glossary of experts. For images, video, audio systems with extremely high cost and low efficiency, the value of tagging is more pronounced.

Example: Watercress can not afford to ask experts on the system of resources for films, books, music, or other categories, or not yet the strength of Full-text search, then how to find a gay theme of the film? TakeGeneral SearchAndTag SearchThe results, the divergence of the results of the comparison, you can feel the power of the public.

(2) All tags used to describe an information are often shared publicly, and their distributions often appear in the long tail convergence shown in Fig. 1 (Shirky, C. 2005). Each tag and its frequency, can reflect the general public to the nature of the information broadly consistent definition, and not let the minority opinion (minority opinion) completely submerged.

Figure 1: Tag frequency distribution of two deli.cio.us bookmarks

· more humane information retrieval .
The above beneficial, ultimately optimized search: Because of a set of system information (such as personal blog, all photos of Flikr, YouTube, all video) More access points, users in the information ocean to find the need to match the information opportunities are also higher. That is, the use of the wisdom of the public to make search on the basis of the machine , more semantic, humane, social.

The above three points are tagging SocialAdvantage. Golder et al (2006) suggests that tag roughly describes 7 aspects of information: what it is about (themes, classifications, attributes, etc.), what it is (title, type, etc.), who owns it (author, collaborator), modifies tag's tag, and its Quality(funny, shocking, etc), Self-reference(I have bought, my book, etc.), Task Management(To be read, to find a job, etc.). The classification is not absolute, but the following three kinds of tags in the indexing information is a major feature of Self-sex。 The benefits of this are:

· Assistant Personal Information management。 For personal information management, tag can play a greater role. Because of its highly customizable nature, information can be personalized to describe, so that the personal use of the story (context) as part of the information description. "Very like", "I Want", "Mother's birthday" such as tag, is the system more difficult to user index.

· Identity Recognition。 such as from a blog tag cloud/list, you can see the interests of bloggers, and even professional and other personal information.


Figure 2: Tag cloud for a blog
Marlow et al (2006) and Ames & Naaman (2007) have explored the motivations of user tagging (table 2), showing SocialAnd Self-sexThe combination.

Table 2:tagging's motives

This brings another advantage: the construction of social network。 Tag poly (information), also poly people. On the one hand, it shows a person's interests and hobbies, so as to help individuals find like-minded people. On the other hand, it can aggregate interest groups. For example, flikr the last syntax error, the ambiguous form of the tag, Sometaithurts(So meta-it hurts, so "meta level", so painful), but gathered a variety of photos from various users. The sometaithurts individual on the photo tag, gathered by tag, has a chance to further socialize with each other and will gather more for the tag.

2-3. Tagging's Disadvantages

Tagging the most criticized characteristics are: lack of consistency, ambiguity, grammatical errors. This is due to the comparison with the experts:

· The public is "lazy".: Tagging may stay on the superficial surface without doing deep thinking or accurate description. Especially when tag and the inherent classification of the system overlap, it will lose value. For example, for the film on the Watercress "movie" The meaning of this tag is zero.
· The public is "hypocritical".: Someone will be in order to let themselves appear in search results ahead of the goal and so disorderly tag;
· The public is "stupid."：
(1) Spelling problems. In addition to spelling words, English phrases in the separation, case, single plural, etc. will create a lot of chaos tag;
(2) No memory. It is shown that individuals use inconsistent tags (such as literal differences, same meaning, etc.) in the same system to label the same or similar content.

This leads to a lot of polluting garbage tag, which is called the noise in search results, thus reducing the efficiency of retrieval. But this is not the Achilles heel of tagging, which can be improved through design guidance. The third part will commence the discussion.