Just a Thought...

Adobe Photoshop Elements provides “visual tagging” to make organizing your photos easier. Once the tags are created, using the tags is pretty cool. The problem is the process of tagging. First, let’s consider the parts they’ve done correctly:

• You can organize, rename, and annotate your tags
• Tags include a photo, which is automatically assigned the first time you use it
• You can have several tags on each picture

Now, what’s wrong with that? Nothing if you can accept the limitations of assigning tags. Yes you can select several photos at once and assign the same tag to all the pictures, which can save some time. But to add each and every tag you have to go through this sequence of events:

1. Right click on the photo in the organizer
2. Navigate to the “Attach Tag” sub-menu
3. Navigate to the tag you want through your tag hierarchy

Now, imagine going through this process after photographing your son’s basketball game. I’d like to be able to give a set of photos to his teammates and the cheerleaders, but to do that I have to tag each picture with who’s in it. Any picture will have between 1 and 5 teammates or up to the whole cheerleader squad (about a dozen girls). The pictures are in the order they were taken throughout the game, so they aren’t neatly grouped based on who is in the pictures (unlike family outings). To top it off, each game has over 100 pictures with some around 200 pictures. Imagine going through your collection and organizing things by tag in this situation. My hierarchy has People->Team->person and People->Cheerleaders->person. The event tags are not a problem, as are the subject tags. It’s the people tags.

So, since complaining without thinking how it could be better is useless, let me describe how things can be better: Flickr Organizer. Using the Flickr Organizer, I can grab any arbitrary selection of pictures with some nice search features to find the ones I want. I can then easily add the same set of tags to all the photos in that collection. That’s right—set of tags. Not one tag at a freakin’ time. I can then clear my working group, and set up a new one. It’s not perfect, but it is much better than what I have to do for Adobe Organizer.

Maybe that was a little too trite. What can we do within the confines of the Adobe Organizer app? The three things I mentioned at the top are good things. They help after the tags are assigned, and offer some advantages over online tagging applications. I just don’t want to navigate a complex menu hierarchy to assign one tag. In fact, I don’t want to navigate a menu hierarchy at all. What should happen then?

• I type a keyboard shortcut (which would be for the right-click menu option “Attach Tags…”
• A small dialog box pops up with key focus on the tag entry text box.
• The entry box has type-ahead so I can select the tag as the list narrows
• I can add as many tags as I want at one time
• When I click “Apply” or some equivalent button, all the tags I selected are applied
• If I create a whole new tag, the dialog will let me add it to a category later. This allows the set of tags to grow naturally, yet still maintain order.

When I have to add 12 tags, this will be a real time saver. It will even save time when I only need to add one. Right clicking and navigating a menu hierarchy requires a lot of mouse movements, and sometimes the menu opens to the right and sometimes the menu opens to the left. Sometimes the mouse goes outside the menu, and I have to start all over again. With a dialog box that allows me to add one or more tags at once, I only have to worry about one thing—and since focus will automatically be on the tag entry box I won’t need to move my mouse at all. After all, tab order will let me get to the button I want which will save me time as well.

I’m sure it seems odd for me to question this after I’ve doted on its merits and how easy it is to do. How many people use the bookmark tools like Ma.gnolia.com or del.icio.us? How many people have used something like Flickr, etc? When you think about it, the number of sites like this are surprisingly small. Even though there are a number of users, few are there because of the tagging. It’s because they get some value out of the site that they don’t get somewhere else. Flickr works because of the communities, where you can find groups to shoot the breeze or perfect your craft—whatever you want.

Even now, the only thing I use Ma.gnolia.com for is to manage the list of links on my blog. I don’t participate in the groups or anything like that. Quite frankly, I don’t have enough time to read a whole bunch of blogs or follow links like I used to. Tagging the links are less important in that case. Sometimes I want to find an old link, and I can use the tags to get back to the article I wanted. However, after you’ve applied the knowledge in the article a few times, there’s no real value in keeping it around. Yet, there’s effort required to go back and remove it. Since I only list the most recent X number of links on my blog, that’s usually enough for me.

There are some places where I really think that tagging would be the right solution to find things again. One example would be iTunes, or whatever you use to manage your music. Setting up play lists based on tags is a great feature, so I’ve kind of forced that model on iTunes. Of course, I fear such a feature would go wasted on a great number of people because they don’t really see the value in it. Once you get over a certain number of songs you are managing, you really do need a better way to sort and organize your music than just the artist, genre, album type information.

There are some common elements of tagging software such as all the tags are displayed on the right. Sometimes they are shown in clouds, and sometimes they can be combined to narrow the selection more. However, things can become messy when you have the common left side navigation elements along with right side tag information. What’s the right thing to do? Should you mix the functionality of bookmarking sites and information providers?

Honestly, since bookmarking sites make it relatively easy to integrate with other sites, I think that they should handle the bookmarking features, and what you are doing should work on the content. It can get messy quick. Really quick. Should you allow multiple identical tags on an object from different users? How do you display them? If someone deletes a tag, and it’s just their version that goes away and someone else’s tag is there, what should the app do?

Truth be told, tagging is still the realm of power users. I wish it weren’t, but there’s still a lot to be discovered about how people use tags, and the types of things you can do with them.

For us power users, the benefits of folksonomies are self evident. The metadata we apply to something , whether it is a picture, an article, a movie, or something else assists us in a variety of ways. It can be used to help us find that thing again, or it can help us understand what went into making that thing, or something that only benefits you. Of course, those tags can help other people as well, but that benefit is by coincidence and not necessarily design. However, for people who are completely new to tagging, the benefit is elusive. There is some user education that needs to go on. If a third party creates a cool thing that consumes a set of tags, that is enough to educate the newbies.

The wide disparity of user experience makes it hard to design systems properly. On one hand, there is a distinct education gap that needs to be there for the uninitiated. The folks who just don’t seem to get it aren’t necessarily Luddites (AKA technophobes). Just like anything, nobody is going to do something unless they get benefit out of it. Tags do help with refindability, notations, and integrating separate sites together via mashups.

The issue that social site designers face is balancing ease of use, education, and supporting all the baggage that seems to come with these sites. After all, there is a certain expectation that power users have of a “web 2.0” social site. They expect to be able to use their information across several sites, pulling data in through loose, but well defined interfaces. It’s also near mandatory to provide some way for users to find and talk to each other. All these functions have to be accessed in some way.

The danger in letting the power user define the user interface, is that they want nearly every feature at their fingertips. It’s just a physical impossibility. A screen has only so much real estate, and only a handful of features are necessary right there. Simplicity and negative space go out the window, and you get a crowded interface that will scare away any new users. You really need something that gives normal users the impression that they can use the site. Negative space is reassuring to people. Having only the right tools available at your fingertips also helps. I think that Flickr has done a good job for doing this for people sharing pictures, but borrowing the design wholesale for something completely unrelated probably won’t work so well.

The danger in designing to the lowest common denominator is that you provide an interface that is too restrictive, and becomes painful to do anything cool. You want to give your users the feeling that they can do cool things with your site. That includes the power users and the newbies as well. Too much negative space, and simplisticness don’t provide enough of a clue for what a user can do. Sure they get over the “I suck” stage pretty quickly, but they never reach the “I rock” stage. Worse, if it is too hard to figure out how to do advanced things your users will sink into the “you suck” stage and leave.

As always, the balance is difficult to work out—but not impossible. But to add to the design challenge is the nature of social interaction. When you design a site for social interaction at any level, you have to address a few issues. First, a community that is too small can’t sustain itself. People need to find other people that they can trust to help them improve in some way. Second, if a community gets too big, it will collapse under its own weight. When there are too many people the individual voice gets drowned out and people lose interest when their voice can’t be heard. Sure you might have a couple shining stars, but breaking the barrier to become a star becomes near impossible unless you started in that position when the community was small. It’s the nature of human interactions. When the only currency that you can trade is ego, we need to create a way for that currency to get you as far as possible. Just creating new groups for discussions isn’t the best. It’s hard to break the small community barrier. There needs to be something bigger than personality to generate interest. There has to be a common goal, which is more difficult to achieve than common interests. Sure you may like to see sunsets, but how much can you really talk about them?

Finally, I apologize for taking so long to post. I’ve been very busy with design meetings with my client. There are things we may not see eye to eye on, but we will eventually get to a happy medium where we can both be happy. That’s the longest part of the design process when the customer has their own opinions. At the end of the day we have the same goals, and we both want the users for the system to be happy. We just have different ideas of how to achieve those goals.

I am researching what companies have technologies can suggest tags from the content of posts. For example, if I post a blog entry, the technology would automatically tag my content with appropriate tags. The way most link tagging sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com perform this task is by taking tags other people have used and you have used to suggest something. That’s great when you have several different people all tagging and marking links differently. That’s not so great when there is a central content like Flickr or a blog like this one. There’s one copy of the article, one copy of a picture, etc. There just isn’t a wider pool of tags to suggest from. The only way then is to analyze the content, and see how other similar content has been marked.

The academia approach involves natural language processing, storing contextual models of both the tag space and the content. You can get pretty accurate with that kind of approach, and even discover when there are tags that are misspelled but mean the same thing, etc. I’ve done some searching around and found Language Computer which is the research arm of Lymba . I also found a paper from TagAssist about the topic.

No matter how you slice it, this approach is going to take some number crunching and disk space. That means multiple machines to process the content on the way in. For very low volume submission sites like my blog, it might be possible to do everything on one machine. For higher volume submission sites like the one I’m working on, that’s a real problem to work through.

The question I have, and I haven’t been able to find much on the subject, is if there are low-tech solutions that will get us 50 percent of the way there for a little investment. We may have to do this “cool” integration at a later stage, depending on the costs involved. I need to find a set of alternatives and choose what will be the best match, but this is a relatively new application for this type of technology. If anyone has some clues, please let me know.

Just as fat molecules carry aroma to our nose, words carry ideas from one person to another. It‘s how we communicate. Computers don‘t care about words, to them they are just a series of bytes that they are told to store and barf back up to people. At the end of the day, a computer processes byte code, and even then the byte code that it is given to execute is further recompiled into a lower order byte code. The different programming languages are there for us. They exist because their roll is to translate our ideas into instructions for the computer.

That said, ever wonder why tags are called what they are, and not keywords? After all, in the past, you could mark your site with keywords and search engines would be able to find the pages. And then the porn industry abused that by putting every keyword known to man so they could get good page rankings. The idea has been around for decades, but it didn‘t really catch on until we used the word “Tag“ to reflect the concept. All the sudden it was couture to expose these words to the world, and let just anybody play with them. It‘s because “Tag” didn‘t seem to carry its own weight until it was shown to the world how they could practically make the world a better place. Sites like Flickr and del.ico.us used the tags in ways to make it easier to figure out how to find stuff you cared about.

From the machine‘s perspective, it doesn‘t care what tags you use. You could use obtuse tags like “rous286“ and the computer wouldn‘t complain one bit. It doesn‘t work to well for us, because the idea behind that obtuse name is lost. Are we talking about “Rodents of Unusual Size in February of 1986“ or “Release Operations in the U.S. for the Intel 80286“? We use words for our benefit. We might use a whole bunch of words, or just a couple. The ideas are always there, and there are only so many words that fit an idea. Tags work because of that very fact. When we have an idea and we want to search the world about that idea, someone somewhere probably had the same idea and had at least one word that matched what you were thinking of. It‘s just a matter of playing the odds.

Another case and point for words carrying a lot of weight would be the recent attempt to create a spec language. Instead of “Test First Development“, it was called “Spec First Development”. The activities you did were the same, but the language was different. You thought in terms of what something should do verses testing what it did. The specification is forward looking while tests are backwards looking. At least that is the concepts that those words carry. The fact that you use different words didn‘t change the underlying technology all that much. However, it does influence the way your wrap your head around things.

The last case of words carrying power is more of a sad and dark tale. Someone whom I greatly respect, who is a champion for caring about our users and understanding how they think, has been assaulted with words rather publicly. I‘d love to say she is a friend of mine, but I‘ve never even met her and have only exchanged an email or two with her. Nevertheless, from what I gather she isn‘t the type of person to create enemies wherever she goes. I don‘t want to provide any links to reignite any burning embers that might still be around. There are some people who chose to use threatening words toward this person, causing her to stop all speaking engagements and retreat from any sort of public eye. If words had no true power, then why are death threats illegal? The expression of intent, whether there is any true animosity or not, is enough to incite fear. I consider the acts taken to be completely reprehensible, and the people who participated in her harassment have no defensible position. They should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. What they have done has caused far more damage than one person‘s mental well being. To cop out and say “it was only a joke“ is to trivialize the damage done to all of us. The person was a great asset to the world of computing, championing the cause of bringing the “human” back to human interfaces. She‘s still alive, but now she is trying to live much more quietly.

Words have power, and words have meaning. Tagging works because of this. Blogging works because of this. Unfortunately, threats also work because of this. We all have the power to change the world around us, even if only a little bit. People who put their reputation on the line and take unpopular stands are the ones who receive the most flack — but also influence the most change. You can only achieve what you risk. I‘d like to challenge everyone to not take the coward‘s way out. Sure there is a right way to approach those in charge, and I suggest you use an attitude of respect if you want to get anywhere. Good processes, good working environments, and good software can only be accomplished when people are willing to champion the cause. I‘m willing to be one of the champions, how about you?