Talking about Web tag design

Why care about Web tags

This week every afternoon will spend some time to read the log of the website, the website log records the user in browsing the website behavior trajectory, not each company can invite the user to carry on the test and the interview, therefore the website log is the operator and the designer to understand the user an important way.

In the user's search log, found that many users do not use our design tags, usually in the external search engine input related content, search engine matching, and then back to our page, repeatedly browsing our pages, such as a user booked Zhouzhuang scenic tickets, but he wants to know about Zhouzhuang hotel, We are in the Scenic product page has presented the hotel entrance, but users in the search box to enter Zhouzhuang accommodation, and sometimes even jump to the outside search engines, fortunately we have a strong SEO team, and finally led the user back to the site, where our label is not user awareness, users do not know the meaning of our label conveyed , what is the role of the label in the website?

Tags are an important way to simplify the site, it represents a lot of information on the site, the purpose is to guide users quickly accessibility to the Web site. For example, "About Us" is a label that represents a large chunk of content, including company information, address, telephone number and fax, and the user sees "about us" to understand what is presented after this label.

Recently I have also been concerned about the information architecture of the website, the label is an important part of the information architecture, combined with the site's log analysis of the Web tag design to organize some ideas.

Two label categories

In fact, each of us is a label designer, we every day for ourselves or for others to do a variety of labels, QQ materials have a friend impression of the function, you can add a variety of tags for your friends; now the light of the fire also has the ability to add tags to yourself, Flickr image uploads can add labels for each picture, Convenient for other users to search and view, the current online largest bookmark site Delicious is also increasingly popular with the Internet friends. General website of the label for all users, the vast majority of users can understand the label is a good label, the site tag is probably divided into the following four kinds: navigation tags, title tags, contextual tags and index tags.

Navigation tags are very well understood, is the site's navigation bar, generally we enter the site, the first thing to see is the site's navigation, navigation allows users to understand the general structure of the site, for example, the same network is a 11-level navigation tag, corresponding to the "home", "six major tourism products" and "three major ancillary products."

The title tag is a description of a chunk of information, and sometimes the user just glanced at our site, and do not want to spend too much time to view, the title tag needs to be graded, different levels should be visually different effects, as the process knows the right column problem classification is a level of title tag, corresponding to the following "eat", "Live", "line , "Swim", "buy" and so on level two title label.

The contextual label is a special kind of label, as the name implies is based on the context of the label, if the entire site and content can create a user situation, that this label is a success of the label, otherwise different users have different understanding, like the previous mentioned QQ friend impression label, when users see these tags, In connection with its various manifestations in life, can intuitively understand this person's personality and preferences, blog sites will usually only use contextual tags, because most users are good friends, familiar with each other, tags can be designed to blur some of the mysterious sense of the site appropriate use of contextual tags can increase the interest of the site.

Index tags are often called meta keywords, can be simple and accurate matching, users can easily understand the meaning of the index tag. The simplest index tag is an English letter that matches the relevant information with the English alphabet.

Three-label design

How to design and build the label of the website, remember the original in the design of their own site has been very tangled tags, reference a lot of related sites, and finally combined their content to set down three navigation labels, in fact, the label design has two important sources, respectively, content and users.

Content

Content for the king, tags can be directly from the content analysis of the site, you can choose the representative content of the site, as we write articles, there are topics, keywords and abstracts, these can form a label, the key is how to find a representative content, label design is a painful and lengthy process, need to pay a lot of effort, Sometimes when inspiration comes to an available label, it is said that label design is an artistic work.

As you analyze the content, you can find the provider or author of the content, ask the author to label his content, because the author is very familiar with their content, the author's label may be the most useful, many of the company's Web site content is the marketing department of the students in charge, they go to find resources and mining user needs, But the site's tags are mostly design department architects or designers in charge, where the small differences in understanding of the content leads to the user can not finally understand the label correctly.

Another way is to look for industry experts or the industry reputation better site, they have a more in-depth study of user needs, standing on the shoulders of predecessors, you will consider a more comprehensive.

User

The user of the website is the best source of the label, is also the end user of the label, users will say what they like the label, whether directly or indirectly from the user, this information is very valuable.

Directly to the user for testing and interviews, let the user participate in the website's label design, in this process generally will adopt the card classification, the card classification in the qualitative research is widely used, the card classification which uses in the label system design divides into the open and the closed, the open card classification is provides the content for the test, Let the test for each content named label, closed card classification for the participants to provide content and tags, a content corresponding to a few tags, let the subjects choose and exclude priority, in the course of the experiment, you can also let users say the reason for the selection of labels, the host should be ready to record.

Due to the limitation of time, manpower and financial resources, card classification in the label design is difficult to apply in the domestic companies, only some large companies will spend a lot of time and effort to do user research, prior to March and the company and Procter and Gamble on a new product customer satisfaction research project, in order to obtain the consumption characteristics of the test, In the project, a card taxonomy was used to allow the participants to choose a set of pictures to represent his current life and ideal life, these pictures include different consumption level, through the selected pictures, we also from the relevant perspective to analyze the consumption characteristics of the test, this is my first time to apply the card classification to the actual, The result of the project was also quite satisfactory.

The vast majority of companies are analyzing and mining site data, such as query the user's behavior trajectory to guide the site's label design, this is an effective way, the search log analysis is an important source of the label, according to the user on the site left traces, including users to browse the page, user clicks on the label and content, Users search for the use of keywords, etc., the search log records users in their language to describe their information needs, these are the most authentic user language, than the user himself to say that there is value, I found that many of the site's label language is too academic or professional, a look at it, the label is a computer person or company leader to write out.

Excellent label design is a prerequisite for Web site usability, the development of the Internet, a huge increase in information, we also saw a lot of Internet products began to let users participate in the label design, the social label is bound to be the future of the Internet development trend, try to use the popular user language to design labels, May be able to bring your site traffic to an order of magnitude increase.

Source: http://www.wwued.com/?p=221