3 ms·
It's not about whether users aren't smart enough for tags. It's whether tags work the way users want them to. Tags are for organization. People like to organ
by roc 14y ago
It's not about whether users aren't smart enough for tags. It's whether tags work the way users want them to.
Tags are for organization. People like to organize things in terms of visual hierarchies and landmarks. Raw tagging systems aren't popular, because most people don't memorize precise strings. [1] They remember roughly what directories look like and 'know where things are' based on whether they believe they can confidently determine "it" from "not it" while they navigate a structure.
e.g. Was the tag "RaptorX" or "2012 Predator" or "FooBird"? The user doesn't know. But they do know that when they navigate their project folders, they'll be able to pick out whichever project was fuzzily translated to "something like a bird of prey" in their mind. And they'll be able to do this as they navigate into a tree, as fast as if they had remembered exact strings. [2]
So when people are looking for something quickly, they're going to like the visual hierarchy. And when they're first saving a file [3], or when they're looking to open something when they 'know' where it is, they respond very positively to a visual hierarchy.
It's not about 'hiding' the fact that those 'folders' are tags. Or hiding the fact that files can live in multiple places (with multiple versions no less). We're still talking about new software that people would have to be trained on and told about its particular attributes.
So the fact that, yes, you need a dialogue to capture explicit intentions when doing move/copy operations in a pseudo-folder tag system is not a problem.
[1] Also why command line OSs and command line navigation are unpopular. People really like visual organization.
[2] In my experience, this is what people are really saying when they insist they'd rather navigate than search, even when they 'know' where something is. It's because they "know" where something is, in terms of landmarks in the visual tree. They know in a fuzzy way. And fuzzy searching is either frustrating, or requires nailing down enough tangential data (user/date/file type) that searching isn't any faster than navigating.
[3] Almost no-one wants to think about proper taxonomy or organization or an exhaustive document profile when they're drafting a new document. They just want to stash things somewhere where they can find them tomorrow and/or reasonably direct a third party to them. Proper organization is almost always a discrete mental process that happens after a document is 'done'.
- bradleyland 14y agoI agree with pretty much everything you said there. I guess you could summarize my post as, "just don't call them folders." I do like that idea though. Users often treat folders like tags. In a manner of speaking folders are tags, in that they label the contents. They just happen to be organized in a hierarchy. The tags get more specific as you dig deeper in to the tree. I'll have a go at reasoning by anecdote. For some reason, the default behavior of the Finder search field searches your entire computer as you type. This always struck me as odd, because it is 180 degrees from what I wanted. I would frequently: * Navigate to a relatively shallow point in a folder hierarchy * Start searching from there, expecting that my search would be constrained to this location I do this because I know (generally) where something might be, but I can't recall exactly where. I ended up reconfiguring Finder to behave like this. If you split the folder path by separator, you often get a set of tags. So, by drilling down in to a folder heirarchy, you're "scoping" your search by tags, getting more detailed as you go. I think hierarchy may be the missing piece of the tagging puzzle. A hierarchy would provide guidance (and a visual component). It says, "start broad, then get specific". Imagine a workflow where you would navigate to a specific point in the tag tree, then create a document. Doing so would associate the document with the current tag set without any additional work. If needed, the user could add additional tags, drilling down as they go. My most important point about "folders" is just that we should avoid referring to these new systems as such. If we want to make progress, we need to unhinge users' thoughts from old concepts.
- roc 14y ago> "My most important point about "folders" is just that we should avoid referring to these new systems as such." Fair enough and I absolutely agree. Though be prepared for users to refer to them as such. And as to tag hierarchies - that's where things have been going. At least, those things I follow (DMSs, CMSs-not-named-Wordpress). It also addresses the concern raised upthread of "Company A\Secrets\Company B vs Company B\Secrets\Company A". With hierarchical tags, this isn't remotely a problem.