I started using Delicious again after a one-year hiatus. I am impressed with the new interface. At first, I though they just reskinned the old design – lipstick on a pig, if we are still allowed to use that phrase. After using it for a week, I see that they have made a number of subtle but crucial changes to the user interface.

Today, I am writing about the tagging interface, which is my favorite of these changes. I really like the new interface. I offer some tips on using it effectively, and some recommendations to the design team on further improvements.

Delicious has experimented with different tagging mechanisms over the years. While in theory, most of these are good ideas, the implementation has usually been disappointing. Here are some examples from ‘old del.icio.us’:

• type-ahead in the text box from your tag list (smart and handy)
• tags for this page that are popular with other users (often lame or irrelevant)
• tags you have used on similar pages (a messy jumble)

But delicious didn’t let you customize the tagging form at all, so many of these tag-help mechanisms were bland and irrelevant. At least that was my experience with them. I guess if you only used ten tags they might have been perfect for you. I have enough tags that I needed to group them just to keep them straight.

One method I used to keep my Delicious tags organized is a tag bundle, which is a group of similar tags. In previous versions of the site, the tag bundle was pretty useless, only providing a method to cluster the display of the endless mess of your tags into some semblance of order. It was a non-exclusive two-level taxonomy, for those of you who like that stuff.The combination of tags and bundles gives a person the ability to add a little more semantic meaning to their bookmark collection. Tags show that two bookmarks are similar, while bundles show that two tags are similar.For example, here are two partial bundles from my own collection:

• bundle: genre - analysis, howto, methods, research, practice, process, theory
• bundle: topic - accessibility, ia, ixd, usability, ux, etc…

My intent is to use a tag from the genre bundle with a tag from the topic bundle for most bookmarks. For example, a page might be a howto on IA methods. Fairly specific, right?

The real revolution in the new Delicious interface is that the tag bundles are now an integral part of the tagging form. This means users can customize their personal IA space entirely, from the data entry to the display to the RSS feeds. This is a huge boon to people like me (disclosure: I’m a professional information architect with a library degree, so I organize my stuff with more rigor than most folks). The design is not perfect, so I have listed a couple recommendations below – but it is a huge step forward, and Delicious deserves kudos for making it work.

The new interface rewards certain bundling behaviors. I have discovered some of these behaviors in my week of experimentation.

Bundling Tips

1. Frequently used bundles should have some punctuation in their name so they will show up at the top of the list. Personally, I use ! for action tags like !toread as well as . for high-volume bundles, like .genres. This places those at the top of the bookmarks display AND the tagging form.
2. Frequently used tags should stay in smaller bundles. The order of tags in a bundle is a bit random, probably ordered by frequency of use, so having more than about 12 tags in a bundle quickly becomes a useless mess. You will see a couple of one-line bundles in my collection, which contain the highest-volume tags.
3. Don’t bundle all your tags. I used to strive to bundle everything. The new interface actually makes this counter-productive, since only bundled tags show up in the form. Bundling everything increases the length of the form and the page load time.

Design Recommendations

Overall I am really impressed with the new tagging interface, but it is not perfect. Here are a couple of suggestions for the design team.

• The sort order for each bundle should be customizable, and it should be the same between the data entry and the display pages. Right now, if I set my tags to display in alpha order in the display view that has no effect on the data entry view. At the very least, switch the default data entry UI to use alphabetical sorting and retain the ‘most used’ filter on the tag list.
• We should be able to select which bundles we want to use in the data entry screen. There is no need to list every tag as a link on the form. This makes the page load time longer (although that is better recently!) and the form needlessly long. The type ahead already provides error-correction on the full collection of tags, so let us down-select to just the bundles we really plan on using.