Sharing "Discoverability" Through Better Tag Strategies

Let's explore a recent job requirement for usability folks that may affect you.

From Flickr.com (seeking Sr. Product Manager):

Build a strategy and product requirements for Flickr features focused on the core photo sharing experience. Partner with user experience team on projects to improve site-wide usability anddiscoverability.

The usability job skill ("discoverability") in this job description involved finding stuff – pictures. In other venues, stuff could be music, books, restaurants, movies, food, clothing – or even a document from your organization's intranet.

So, are you supporting your user's need to find the right stuff when they enter their search criteria? This involves "tagging" – our topic for this UI Design Newsletter.

But the other job skill (sharing experience) involves user experience, or, as HFI calls it, PET (Persuasion, Emotion, Trust) approach.

Now, let's examine how you can guide your organization in both of these goals: discoverability of just the right product or service – but taking into account the PET motivation derived from the social sharing experience (also known in PET terms as "social proof").

We'll report on a 2010 study from seven European researchers affiliated with the L3S Research Center. They aimed to extract additional benefit from the "tagging" efforts by end-users.

As you know, tagging provides social web benefits through "crowd sourcing" efforts in identifying stuff others may want to know about. Delicious.com and other page tagging sites collect tags from folks – the "common person". This means everybody helps create a "catalog" of sites, all indexed by a "taxonomy" of common, descriptive words.

Web savants call the results of such tagging a "folksonomy". The resulting taxonomy from the tagging helps folks find what they want using the language given by the masses.

How can you insure your end-users ("folks") use the best tagging practice for objects, concepts, pictures, or documents? That's what we'll learn, next.

Read full article:

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/dec11.asp