Jonathan’s Tag Browser
Since Jonathan Deutsch finally got around to writing about the experimental tag UI he implemented for Cocoalicious, I thought I’d do a quick post of my own to point everyone to his write-up and mention that I’m curious to hear peoples’ feedback about the design.
As Jonathan mentions, he, Andrew Wooster, and I demoed this UI at TagCamp back in October to what I would characterize as a mixed reaction. Many people loved it, but others were concerned that the effect of the tags constantly re-ordering themselves was too disorienting. I, on the other hand, would argue that when you reach something like 900 tags (as I have on del.icio.us) spatial orientation is practically useless for navigation, and what you really need is something to help you quickly explore the relationships between your tags. And besides, the only alternative approach anyone suggested at TagCamp was the Treemap, which I think is a lot more confusing than what we came up with.
One of the things I personally love about this interface is the way it helps me discover unexpected connections in my accumulated del.icio.us knowledge. When you have 2000+ bookmarks, as I do, it’s very likely that you only remember a tenth of what you’ve actually bookmarked, and, while it may be a given that my related tags for, say, “intellectualproperty” would include “music,” it might be less obvious that they would also include “ireland” or “cooking.” It’s certainly possible to uncover such unexpected connections using the normal del.icio.us “related tags” interface, but Jonathan’s UI makes this process of drilling down almost as fast as thought itself.
Tagging (at least del.icio.us-scale tagging) presents what is almost certainly one of the most difficult UI challenges I can imagine. I’ll be interested to see how useful people find our solution once it makes it into a released build.
January 18th, 2006 at 11:43 am
I think that will definitely be a good addition to the UI. I currently use the tag browser very little - mostly because of what you and Jonathan describe. (and it doesn’t hurt that the new browser has some entertaining animations
January 18th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Dare I say I might use Cocoalicious a whole lot more than I do now with this in place. And Treemap? eww.
January 19th, 2006 at 5:32 am
Wow, that looks great! I think that would really increase the usefulness of tagging. Now I use tagging on del.icio.us more like categories (i.e. no long tail), but I think that would change with this UI. I won’t care about cluttering up my tags list with obscure tags. Any idea when we’ll see it in a release?
January 20th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
A user applescript request: I’d like to be able, via applescript, to choose which user identity I post a link as. As in “post as user [user] with password [password]”.
Because I have two delicious ids, and sometimes want to post to one, sometimes another. It’s a work/play thing.
February 12th, 2006 at 3:57 am
My knee-jerk reaction, seeing the first screen shot, was “That’s a lot of space used, and I have a LOT of tags”, but it’s actually quite space-efficient for what it offers, esp. exposing tag relationships/intersections, you quickly see that this is an excellent, well implemented solution.
Like you say, this is very effective in drawing out the relationships between tags…
…but doesn’t this make a fundamental change to the UI? The browsing pane is nowhere to be seen in the displayed mockups, so what will the selection/activation behaviour be?
I’ve made a ‘far too long’ post on Jonathan’s blog about this experimental interface, and I really do hope to see it in Cocoalicious, so that we can all see what it’s like in action, and maybe see the naysayer’s eat their words! ; )