disambiguity

I’m terrible at tagging. How about you?

I don’t know about you, but when i look at my Flickr and Del.icio.us tags and even the categories for my blog, it makes me realise that folksonomies are not so simple.

Particularly my Del.icio.us account is now so completely out of control that I frequently can’t find things that I *know* I saved and tagged… and I’m supposed to know a thing or two about how to label things!

Where are the main problems? Plurals and abbreviations are my biggest foes. Sometimes I pluralise, sometimes I don’t. Generally I use the full word or term, but occasionally I’ll use an abbreviation, or both! If a term has two words to it, the way that I join the words to make a term varies.

It’s a complete mess.

Why did this happen? Because I didn’t make any rules when I first started, and my ‘rules’ have evolved over time as I see different ways that other people use tags, and as I succumb to using ’suggested tags’ that break my ‘rules’.

Not only that, but usually I tag in haste, often times because I want to come back and look at the page/site at leisure but I don’t want to lose the link. I’m not really thinking too much about whatever my latest tagging rules might be, and there’s nothing to remind me of what rules I’d decided on.

And, most of all. The system doesn’t care how I tag and doesn’t keep me in line!

it drives me crazy. I feel like a plumber with a dripping tap. But will I ever go back and tidy it up? Probably not. I have a whole lot of links there now - it would take a serious investment of time to tidy up now… and what’s to stop it from ending up in the same state of disrepair in six months time?

If I’m having these kinds of troubles with tagging, then surely others are having even more troubles. And the value of the tagging must surely be diminished because other people are getting less rich results due to my haphazard tagging.

I do love the freedom and flexibility of tagging… but more and more I find myself wanting some rules, and some compulsion to stick to the rules or knowingly break them. And I want a smarter system that realises I’m being silly when I randomly choose to make a tag a plural for no good reason at all.

I want some structure to my tagging.

Do you? Or do you think I’m taking all the fun out of folksonomy?

Photo Credit: AnnDeeScraps @ Flickr

links for 25 August 206

• TechCrunch UK
  aaaw!! A TechCrunch especially for the UK. How sweet. I wonder if they’re going to throw a big party over here soon?
  (tags: news)
• Lorelle on WordPress » Helping you learn more and do more with WordPress
  Helping you learn more about blogging and WordPress every day with help, tips, advice, and techniques for blogging and using WordPress, and Wordpress.com. The blogging help you need. Now.
  (tags: wordpress)
• Design Council| Design Methods
  A collection of easy-to-use design tools, methods and processes for you to use and download.
  (tags: methodology tools process reference)
• How to detect bullshit - scottberkun.com
  People lie for three reasons; the first is to protect themselves. They may wish to protect something they want or need, a concept they cherish, or to prevent something they fear, like confrontation…. a great and useful read
  (tags: communication projectmanagement)
• Has accessibility been taken too far? (JeffCroft.com)
  “I feel the burden of accommodating the minorities should fall on operating system and browser makers.” Hrm… I think this probably requires a blog post in response….
  (tags: accessibility)

links for 24 August 2006

• Jenson Harris - Office User Interface Blog - MSDN Blogs
  “In particular, this blog is all about the new user interface we’ve been working on for Office 2007. This new version does away with menus and toolbars and replaces them with new paradigms such as the Ribbon, Contextual Tabs, and Galleries.” (thanks Damian!)
  (tags: ux HCI microsoft interfacedesign)

wonderfully devious!

oooh. how did I miss this! This is how Peter Morville, god of Findability, described the quasi-tag cloud on Act Now (one of my favourite projects).

Thanks for the pointer to the Act Now site which is very interesting. Of course, they’re not really tags, but controlled vocabulary terms masquerading as tags in a tag cloud…which is wonderfully devious.

I like wonderfully devious. (Thanks for the link Melissa!). More thinking about tag clouds and controlled vocabulary is in order I think…

customer experience: the bad, and the worse

Unfortunately, very average customer experiences are not hard to come across… even from brands that you really want to like… It’s a shame, because sometimes the smallest things can make all the difference. Like… if you’re giving people an automated, machine driven service, then maybe play on what’s good about it - the speed, possibly the accuracy? And compensate for the downside - the lack of personal service. And if humans are providing the service, then *behave* like a human being who is interactive with another human being.

I’m not just an email address you know. I’m a person. And I’m suitably frustrated, concerned, upset by something about your company to be contacting you. I don’t complain much. Perhaps you might take a moment to think about what kind of emotions I might be experiencing and ensure that your response is appropriate to those emotions…. otherwise I might get to thinking you don’t care. If you’ve done something kind of dodgy, then maybe - oh, I don’t know - apologise?!

Good customer experience is very rarely rocket science. It’s usually just a matter of giving a damn and being a little bit thoughtful.

OK, so this is a venting and sharing post. But hopefully it’s instructional and interesting. You be the judge. Or, better still, feel free to vent and share similarly dodgy experiences.

Let’s look at two recent experiences… which will we start with. Bad or Worse?

Read more

links for 23 August 2006

• RateMyProfessors.com - Professor Reviews and Ratings
  oooh, so tempting! includes Australia now, but no one has rated any of my UTS lecturers and I’m not inclined to start the ball rolling…. Go on! I dare you! (via Lucy)
  (tags: community web2.0 university)
• Understanding the Unconference (Digital Web Magazine )
  A useful read for anyone preparing for BarCamp London (or any other unconference I guess)
  (tags: unconference barcamp)
• DesignDemo - Web 2.0, AJAX, and Rails UI Elements (Max Kiesler )
  Max has a great selection of interesting interactive content/information visualisations here.
  (tags: informationdesign visualisation)
• Gucci
  Gucci relauched recently. Quite a yummy site, with an elegant approach to navigation, and despite appearances, no flash. Worth a look (via Ajaxian)
  (tags: design inspiration scriptaculous)
• Participatory Design – and why it’s more than UCD
  A thought provoking report: “What is the status of the ‘users’ you are working with? Are they treated as research subjects providing inspiration for design or are they treated as co-designers?”
  (tags: participatorydesign ethics)
• Playful (Experientia)
  Playful learning with new interfaces (esp. interaction design for museums and public spaces)
  (tags: interactiondesign play museum experience public)
• User Experience Design
  includes the honeycomb diagram outlining the facets of user experience design
  (tags: userexperience UXD)

embedding YouTube videos in Wordpress Blog?

earlier today I was trying to embed a YouTube video in a Wordpress blog and the WYSIWYG editor just couldn’t seem to handle it. Has anyone else had this problem or am I just special? If you have… did you find a way to make it work? I’d love to hear!

Attack of the killer Assumptions (and how to overcome them)

Assumptions are something we battle in kinds of ways. I know when I was doing more project management, trying to get a handle on project assumptions and documenting them was a necessary challenge. Understanding and documenting assumptions was critical to managing my client’s expectations, and making sure that it was actually possible for me to deliver a project on time and on budget.

These days, I’m more likely to make assumptions about the way that people will understand an interface and what they’ll find easy to use. Even though I continually try to train myself NOT to bring assumptions to the table when I’m designing or testing designs - or at least, to position my assumptions more as hypotheses than as a personal truth.

I often learn as much about my own inbuilt assumptions as I do about how people interact with particular interfaces… even now when we are all conscious of the new challenges created by different kinds of novel interface element, it’s a constant challenge to keep assumptions under control (which is - in my opinion - to make them conscious assumptions).

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a few years now and have asked lots of people along the way about their experiences so it was reassuring to see Kathy Sierra sum up my quandary so succinctly in her recent post on Assumptions (and their use by dates):

The really big problem is the assumptions which are so ingrained that we don’t even know they’re assumptions. They become an accepted Law of Physics, as good as gravity.

For me, assumptions are something that you usually become aware of after they’ve bitten you in the butt. Once they’re known, conscious and documented they’re not so scary… in fact, they’re not scary at all.

It’s kind of like being afraid of the dark… when you can’t see what’s under the bed, you imagine all kinds of hideous things. Once the light is on, you wonder how on earth you let your imagination run away with you so crazily.

Kathy is right - once you’ve recognised your assumptions, you can’t just leave them sitting there. You need to pull them out and re-examine them every now and then and make sure that they’re still as they should be, or update them if you need to. (Or, potentially throw them away as irrelevant).

But here’s my question - what do *you* do to try to expose these really dangerous assumptions? The ones you don’t even know that you have? How do you bring them to light and make them known and not dangerous?

Come on. Help me take out some of these killer assumptions.

Image Credit: Kayaness @ Flickr

links for 22 August 2006

• Top 100 font downloads | dafont.com
  lots of great looking *free* fonts. Hooray! (via Kevin again!)
  (tags: font)

alrighty! let’s start organising some usability shindigs!

OK. So right now you think that 14 November seems like ages away, but *really* you know it will be here before you know it. And you know what happens in November?! Yes, of course. World Usability Day. Hooray!

Now, we all love World Usability Day in the past, but this time I have a special interest as I’m helping to coordinate all the activities that are going on in Australia and New Zealand.

So, if you’re in Aus or NZ, and you think you might be up for organising an event for World Usability Day - it could be something kind of serious, or it could be fun. It could take you ages to organise and have hundreds of people, or it could be smaller and less structured and involve just your work place or maybe your clients.

You might have great ideas and want a helping hand, or you might be keen to get involved but not sure what to do.

Well. Here’s what you do now - head over to the World Usability Day website and let us know that you’re keen to be involved. It’s a no-obligation registration of interest at the moment. The idea is that we work together as much as possible, so that we can do even more even fun things all over the place.

So. Come on now. Give me something to coordinate and let’s get some great Australian and New Zealand World Usability Day events on the boil.

(oh, and if you’re not from Australia or New Zealand and you want to be involved, go fill out that form also. There are lots of other lovely people all over the world who will help with coordinating activities in your area).