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’:
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:
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
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.
Yay, glad you like the change. The sort order for tags in that bundle display is supposed to be alphabetical, and it will be after we fix a certain bug. Also, you can close unneeded bundles by clicking the little grey triangle on the left.