Content tagging and taxonomies

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The Design Need:

The user needs to manage a large amount of information and to be able to find the various items at any time. The user may also want to share ideas and resources with others.

Best Practice Examples:

Delicious offers tag suggestions while the user is adding tags to an object.

Best Practice Solution:

Tagging allows users to apply keyword metadata (tags) to all kinds of resources, including documents, articles and photos. There are two types of content: user-generated content, and system (organisation) content. You may have to make other decisions, depending on the type of content involved. Before you start implementing a folksonomy on your site, make sure you know what your audience thinks about actively participating in and contributing to a website. Steps and decisions to take Define how users become members of the system. To persuade people to become members, you should offer a valuable incentive to members over non-members. Adjust the interface according to the activity of the user base. A highly active user base will be more interested in current tag trends than the absolute popularity of tags. The latter will be more interesting to an audience that is less active. Think about the appropriate privacy setting for your website, audience and shared content. There are four main kinds:

  • Everything public: helps to create social hum but will scare off some users.
  • Public default: the user can change the default privacy setting; stimulates sharing behaviour.
  • Private default: the user can change the default privacy setting; discourages sharing.
  • Everything private: no sharing.

Set tagging permissions and define who can create, edit and delete tags.

  • User-contributed systems, basic setting: allows the contributor to add, change and remove tags. This setting can be extended to allow other users to add, change and remove their own tags.
  • System resources, basic setting: connects tags to the tagger’s identity and lets all members edit and delete every tag.

Dos and don’ts

  • Offer a “most popular tags” or “list of related tags” to encourage the use of popular synonyms.  This helps avoid cluttered tags with many synonyms and different spellings pointing to the same item.
  • Only censor tags and resources if there are real problems with inappropriate tags and/or resources. You can manage this by:
    • Monitoring your system for potentially inappropriate tags and content. Then decide on a case-by-case basis whether  there is really an abuse or whether it is simply a description of certain content.
    • Allowing users to flag inappropriate content and tags. This can enhance the sense of community and discourages offensive material.

Why To use this Best Practice:

There are several reasons to offer content tagging on your site:

  • It is an easy way for users to manage their personal info and interests. Applying tags to a resource is an easy and straightforward thing to do.
  • Content tagging on social networks encourages collaboration and sharing.
  • Tagging allows users to express themselves.
  • It is an inexpensive way to gather descriptive metadata for the content on your site.
  • Allowing content tagging can help you to learn about how users use your content and what their opinions are.

More info elsewhere:

• Categorized as Best Practices