Why I Love Folksonomies
I guess I've always known this, but it hit home today during a blue-sky planning meeting for a new project. I was subjecting the team to my usual exhausting exhaustive start-up questionnaire when we reached this question: "Do you use meta tags within the site to catalog content properties, etc.?" This is my entree to discussing thesauri, controlled vocabularies and the like.
The initial response was less than enthusiastic, citing workload, a lack of resources, the scope of the effort and so on—all from the team's perspective. So I made a fast U-turn.
"What concerns me is that your users don't have the same domain knowledge as you," I suggested. "They're coming to the site with imperfect information, modulated by transmission through media and other individuals. They're going to be searching for terms that you never imagined. I just want to be sure they can find what they're looking for."
That got the team rolling. And I said to myself, "What we need to do is let users create the tags for our content. Mix them with a good thesaurus and we're on Broadway!"
I don't know if it's practical, but here's something I'd love to try. User-centered design rightly emphasizes going to the source, to end-users. We typically do this with interviews, contextual observation, usability tests, surveys, card sorts and other user analysis tools. Can we add "folksonomy creation exercises" to the list—that is, invite representative users to assign tags/labels to our content? They wouldn't have to sort it or taxonomize it; we'd simply ask, "What would you call this? How would you label it? What words would you use to describe this?" We could then incorporate the results into the site thesaurus and metadata. (Via UXCentric)
The initial response was less than enthusiastic, citing workload, a lack of resources, the scope of the effort and so on—all from the team's perspective. So I made a fast U-turn.
"What concerns me is that your users don't have the same domain knowledge as you," I suggested. "They're coming to the site with imperfect information, modulated by transmission through media and other individuals. They're going to be searching for terms that you never imagined. I just want to be sure they can find what they're looking for."
That got the team rolling. And I said to myself, "What we need to do is let users create the tags for our content. Mix them with a good thesaurus and we're on Broadway!"
I don't know if it's practical, but here's something I'd love to try. User-centered design rightly emphasizes going to the source, to end-users. We typically do this with interviews, contextual observation, usability tests, surveys, card sorts and other user analysis tools. Can we add "folksonomy creation exercises" to the list—that is, invite representative users to assign tags/labels to our content? They wouldn't have to sort it or taxonomize it; we'd simply ask, "What would you call this? How would you label it? What words would you use to describe this?" We could then incorporate the results into the site thesaurus and metadata. (Via UXCentric)
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