Designing Tag Navigation

Tagging represents a new type of metadata used to organize information. As with all types of metadata, there are advantages and disadvantages to tagging. Also keep in mind that metadata is independent of its UI representation, and that there are many potential ways to leverage tags in an interface. Ultimately, to bring value to your business, people must be able to efficiently navigate your tagging system.

In spite of the dearth of design guidelines at the moment, you must nonetheless understand the broader context of tagging in order to create an effective system.

This presentation offers practical design recommendations around three key steps in the tagging process, with many examples to illustrate each point:
1. Creating tags: In general, encourage tagging and lower barriers to adding useful tags. Make recommendations to help people find the right words to use, allow for tag forms to resemble natural language, and avoid space-separated tagging.
2. Navigating your own tags: People tag so they can return to a resource later. The system must allow people to effectively manage their own tags, including editing, deleting, filtering, sorting, and searching them. The ability to combine tags can also help people find the resources they are looking for quicker.
3. Navigating tags from other users: Finally, a social system let's users share resources via tags. Here, adaptive navigation proves to be helpful, such as with enhanced tag clouds. Expose other types of metadata where appropriate as well, and add structure to tag menus. And because of the social aspect of tagging, consider how to provide rich linking to other members of the tagging community.