Designing Web Navigation

SUMMARY

Social tagging systems offer a new alternative way to classify digital, web-based information. Unlike controlled vocabularies, which are rigid and impersonal, tagging systems grow naturally as average users add personal tags to resources.

When tags become public for an entire community to use, a social classification or folksonomy emerges. Social classifications have many inherent relationships and links, but for a system to be of value these must be exposed and apparent to users of the system. Navigation plays a key role here.

Three key activities in the tagging process are important for effective navigation systems for social classifications: creating tags, using your own tags, and navigating others' tags. This chapter reviewed just some of the techniques and best practices currently in place, resulting in some recommendations for the design of social tagging systems:

Creating tags

Generally, the system should encourage tagging and lower barriers to creating rich, useful tags where possible. One way to do this is by making access to a tagging service quick and easy, particularly for bookmarking services. You can also prompt for tags, where possible, relying on the user's existing tags as well as tags from others. Finally, the system should allow for tag forms to resemble natural language as close as possible

Navigating your own tags

A primary reason for tagging is so that you can return to a resource later. The tagging system must therefore allow people to effectively manage ...