Hi Nicole, A timely question in fact. I was recently working on a UI which is content heavy. More like a wikipedia for a company.The original pages had content with links to keywords on almost every alternate line. Each of those links connected pages within the site itself. All this, making the pages look very cluttered ( link heavy ) and often taking the users away from reading the entire content.
On a trial basis, i have pulled out those links(keywords) and put them in a sort of Tag cloud on the left hand. I expect users to read the text without any hindrance. In case the user wants to know more about various keywords in the content, the 'tag cloud' if we can call it, offers a steady panel to do so. As I await the effects of this, my concern is that Tags are predominantly used to showcase grouped content. A particular case would be photo websites like Flickr, that lets one define a category of images, so when users click on one tag, all images that confirm to that tag/subject are displayed. Is this behaviour dominating enough to let users expect a sort of search results for the content as well? So, the question is, can a tag cloud be a navigation panel ? Looking at http://www.annemarike.com, I wonder what purpose such an interface serves? There is an extensive search required for content that's relevant to me. Not nearly, but close to finding a needle in a haystack. --- On Thu, 2/4/09, Nicole Maron <nic...@technopatra.com> wrote: From: Nicole Maron <nic...@technopatra.com> Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Examples of tags as dominant navigation? To: disc...@ixda.org Date: Thursday, 2 April, 2009, 9:00 PM Hello peers, I'm working on a high-volume video site that covers an enormous number of topics that is growing by 2-5 topics/subtopics per month. Our search is great btu we need to improve wayfinding and browseability. We had an overblown hierarchical structure before that was difficult to manage on the editorial side. Our biggest problems to solve now: 1) Hierarchical structure is problematic because each video can easily fit in multiple categories. For instance, SF Mayor Newsom talking about city greening efforts fits in: government, urban planning, environment, politics, society, and a number of subtopics. The way or site works, videos are autmaticall published to all their topic area. But we don't want the same videos to show up at the same time in 6+ areas of the site. 2) Subnavigation under main topics is unscalable as new subtopics get added.. We want to avoid an unscalable IA, and are exploring ideas around using tags (defined by editorial rather than user-generated; users' tag will be applied for personal/group organization only) for dominant navigation. We feel we need to keep the big buckets for top-level nav, but think there is an opportunity worth checking out. Does anyone have examples of sites that use tags this way? It's fun challenge but I'm trying to decide whether it is worth our very limited UX budget to experiment, or whether we should suck it up and stick with a more familiar 2- or 3-tiered hierarchical structure, using tags as contextual nav on the side? Thanks for playing. I'll happily post a summarized list of examples later. Cheers, ~N~ Nicole Maron twitter: nicolemaron blog: http://technopatra.com/blog ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
