Well that took forever. This turned out to be a very small sample, and of a highly informed and biased group. Furthermore, because of some new policies at SFU, the survey tool SurveyMonkey no longer complies with the universities regulations regarding the Patriot Act, and these results can NOT be included in our final thesis. Darn! Nevertheless, it was good practice for myself in survey design, and analysis, as well as building up a small network of future particpants within the information architechture community. Hopefully this may be helpful for future survey designers out there. OR it could jsut sckew those results all to heck as well.

It seems there were other attempts at user analysis performed at the IA summit this year. Check out Gene Smiths photos of peoples elaborate name tags. great stuff!

And now with out further ado, the much anticipated results of our tagging study. As gene explains, sort of a cultural probe. (ouch… did that hurt?)

The survey has garnered 23 respondents over all, most of them likely as a result of the email invitation that was sent out. As expected, our target demographic was in their mid thirties, using most of the common forms of digital communication available today,(predominantly email (100%), mobile phones (92%), and instant messengers (88%) 90% of the respondents considered themselves able to type, and 57% preferred the apple operating system.

Although only one respondent had not used the tagging functionality of any website, most of them did not find tagclouds very useful or informative, as shown by some quotes such as “not really, it gives me a high level view of the main things I seem to be paying attention to, but mostly it is a pretty picture” and “no, it’s awful. fairly useless except that they show you the top 3-4 tags.” 5 respondents did indicate that the tagcloud was useful to some degree such as “yes, i like seeing which tags i use the most. but i am a librarian.” I did not expect the tagclouds to be that significant part of the tagging experience, and the responses support that. As tags are used in various ways, the tagcloud is only meant to serve as a zeitgeist or gestalt view of the collection of tags. It does not represent the collection so much as the taggers interventions in organizing the collection. Other positive comments regarding tagclouds were, “fun”, “pretty”, “neat”, “handy”, and “cool”. The remaining results will be more useful to me as ethnographic artifacts in my continued exploration of this topic.

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How old are you?
Average age: mid thirties
Total Respondents: 24
(skipped this question):0

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What country is the passport you carry from?
Predominantly: Canada, USA
Total Respondents: 24
(skipped this question): 0

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Check any you have used in the past week.
Mobile Phone: 22
PDA: 5
MP3 player: 12
Email: 24
Instant Messages (Chat): 21
RSS Agreggator (Bloglines): 18
Newspaper: 18
Video Game: 8

Total Respondents:24
(skipped this question):0

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Do you type?
yes: 22
no: 2

Total Respondents:24
(skipped this question):0

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What computer Operating System so you prefer?
Mac:12
Windows:8
Linux:1
Other:0

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Do you use a grocery list?
yes:7
no:6
sometimes:10

Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1

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Do you collect anything?
yes:14
no:7
not sure:2

Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1

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When searching online do you use the advanced search features?
yes:11
no:2
sometimes:10

Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1

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Do you use the tagging functionality of any websites?
yes:19
no:1
sometimes:3
what are you talking about?:0

Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1

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Do you use the color labelling features provided by Mac OS?
yes:3
no:4
I used to:4
I plan to:1

Total Respondents:12
(skipped this question):12

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How many words per minute (best guess is fine)
Average: around 60
Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3

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How many fingers?
This question confused people
Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3

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For what resources do you find tagging most useful?
Web URL’s (links):20
Photos:19
Music:3
Email:5
Other (please specify):5

Total Respondents:22
(skipped this question):2

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Do you ever revise/update tags that you previously entered?
yes:7
no:5
sometimes:10
why would I?:0

Total Respondents:22
(skipped this question):2

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*Describe your tagging ’strategy’ (one word if possible)
Open-Ended Response, remember,performative yet utilitarian, quick and dirty, minimal, personal, broad, easy, uncertain, archival, Pith, improvisational, look for and use tags - currently I am a tagee, not a tagger, semi-consistent, small sets, Eclectic, Flickr-style, quick & dirty. wait. that was 3 words. crap! stop typing!, remembery, carefree, clean, personal, recognizable, clear, findable,

Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3

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For what purpose do you find tagging most useful?
Open-Ended Response

Organizing my material for myself and others.
re-finding as well as publishing
remembering what my photos were taken of
Finding things again for myself when using many different computers in many places.
for re-finding information at a later time, or for organizing artifacts in many different (simultaneous) groupings
refindability
finding my own stuff, sharing my collections of stuff with others, finding out what other people have in their similar collections
Another method of finding archival material.
I like to define content in my own terms, and to understand how other users conceptualize of content. I suppose in that respect it is helpful in searching someone else’s content - such as photos on Flickr.
marking people, places and things that recurr. For example, I might go camping with Mike. Then I go to the beach with Mike. I’m not going to group those photos as Mike — but with tagging, I can find them later.
identifying themes
Making personal collections so I can find things more easily again; creating my own organizational schemes; generating RSS so I can use content elsewhere, different ways of exploring the wide world’s collection of tagged content;

Later search
quickly categorizing stuff so I can find it later

Locating stuff later
In del.icio.us the tagging features lets me discover cool stuff saved by others

watching other people’s streams of consciousness. finding things that are interesting by watching interesting people.
organizing, connecting with like resources
To organize huge amounts of information in a way that’s meaningful to me.

Total Respondents:19
(skipped this question):5

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Does the tagcloud assist you in understanding the organization of a system? If so please describe.
Open-Ended Response

Tagclouds are more like neat tricks than useful tools. It’s fun to see that common tags are bigger/bolder but that rarely provides significant information for me.
no
no, hate ‘em
yes, i like seeing which tags i use the most. but i am a librarian.
When using a system socially a tagcloud helps me to understand the bias of the system’s society.
only slightly
Yes, but probably not as much as I think.
No. Looks cool, but a frequency listing is more useful.
To some degree.
Not so much.
yes - my learning style is very visual so a quick tagcloud view tells me lots
Sometimes, I do not always give them a lot of attention (the cloud heights are very much relative.
No, it’s awful information design, and next to useless.
If it exists, it can help give a quick picture of the topics at hand. Not useful in much depth.
yes. seeing more ‘common’ tags is handy.

Not really. It just lets me see what all the other monkeys find interesting.
don’t use it

no, it’s awful. fairly useless except that they show you the top 3-4 tags.
not really, it gives me a high level view of the main things I seem to be paying attention to, but mostly it is a pretty picture

Total Respondents:19
(skipped this question):5

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Would you be interested in being contacted for future involvement in our study?
yes:15
no thanks!:6

Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3

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Comments? Questons? Feedback of any kind whatsoever?

Total Respondents:11
(skipped this question):13

Technorati Tags: tagging survey

update 04/11/06: there seemed to be a problem with the survey closing too soon, it is now open till the end of april. thanks.

Our presentation was last monday, and all went fairly according to plan. Anthony and myself were pleased with the turnout and response, even though the room was ENORMOUS, as my pictures on flickr will attest to. I was glad we did the last minute hack and slash of the talk as we timed just right for people to get out of there for lunch.

The take away of our presentation was an invitation to our audience to participate in some initial data gathering in the form of a survey. Since our audience now extends onto the web, if you are at all interested in tagging, you too are welcome to complete the following survey, wether you were at the IAsummit or not.

It is a short survey, (approximately 5 min) and there are no mandatory questions, fill in the info you would like to. We will be keeping the survey open for the next couple weeks or so, until at least I can email all the new people I met. When completed the results will be posted here as well. Thanks in advance for your participation!

>>>This way to Our Survey

Technorati Tags: iasummit iasummit2006 survey tagging tagging survey Tags

These were some concepts we wanted to see in a mock up. Currently I am thinking of other ways icons could be more utilized in tagging user interfaces.

Phillip J. got me thinking, about the idea of what he calls egotagging during our discussion at northern voice earlier this month. The idea that if you bookmark something first, you should get some kind of reward as feedback and that should be represented in the interface is an interesting one, although most likely benficial to power users only. A user could build a strong reputation as a “pro boomarker” thereby adding more value/weight to the resources she tags.
In general, I think the del.icio.us UI could employ a tad more color and interaction, (and icons!) but I believe in the concept of slow evolution as well. These mockups show an idea for the “first tag” feedback and introduces the idea of tagging with a diamond (the equivalent of googles’ stars). I think these would also be a FAST and easy way to copy other users’ links into your own collection. (just diamond it!)

‘First Tag‘ and ‘Diamond This‘ input interface

‘First Tag‘ and ‘Diamond This‘ feedback interface

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This was an early thought on introducing color as a tagging element. Using color maps to visualize a tag collection has endless possibilities, but at the very least you could browse your collection by the “dark blueish” color . The feedback UI does not mean anthing too specific, just that each resource would be assigned a color label and it’s proximity to others would be further defined by its position in the color map. The draw back is that it would not allow you to specify two tags with the exact same color.

‘Color Tag‘ input interface

‘Color Tag‘ input interface

Technorati Tags: color tag first mark icons in tagging tag rank Tagging UI Tagging user interface

Two more sketches, both attempts to combine the typical cloud and the associated tags into a single cloud element. The relationship is determined by the number of resources each tag share together, compared to the number of neighbours that tag has has over all resources.

Sketch 1:

The default view is a normal cloud, but as you rollover each tag, the associated tags appear around the tag in a sphere. the biggest issue with this (beyond the messy CSS) is tags with many associations start getting cramped for room, especially at the top and bottom of the sphere. I could set it up with a dynamic radius, so tags with more associations had larger radius, but that could get out of hand, and start drawing off screen, which I definitely want to avoid.

Sketch 2:

Same initial state as #1, but in this instance, the associated tags get a background and colour. I am also trying to suggest the strength of a the relationship between the tags by modifying the tags brightness. The brighter the colour, the more closely related the tags are. It’s pretty subtle at the moment, but it’s not too bad.

I should point out that I have only tested these I FireFox; I’m not looking to publish these formally, and am not interested in testing and debugging in other browsers at the moment. So if these don’t work, do yourself a favour and get FireFox already.

Technorati Tags: delicious API tagcloud tags as interface

Recently, Anthony and I have discussed using the tagcloud for an input interface, as opposed to merely a feedback mechanism that visualizes a collection of resources. Could tag clouds become the common UI for browsing large collections of data as well as organizing and sorting them? A few links that continue this thought.

The Power of Words - A Text Analysis of Political Discourse During Times of Crisis. via info aesthetics Uses a tag cloud to display frequency of words in poltical rhetoric, and goes the additional step of color coding specific words.

More and more I believe, digital assets will be indexed down to finer grains of detail, and users will have the ability to apply different kinds of search methods based on their needs. This collection of Common words in Tom Waits Songs, is an interesting example of an audio collection that has scanned song lyrics and sorts the data on frequency of use. There was alot of work that went into providing this resource, something that only a true fan would do. But its easy to imagine how this data could be available and automated for any musical collection. damn interesting.

Its seems that the trend of tagclouds are going to play an increasing role in HCI in general, not just for all these fancy dancing web 2.0 apps popping up all over the place.
Luke states

Search Folders, Smart Playlists, Virtual Folders, and Tags all group objects based on shared metadata and dynamically update their contents for efficient information retrieval through common attributes

Could they become more ubiquitous than lists to display information? Not given the current state of rendering them thats for sure. There is really going to have to be an evolution for tagclouds as interfaces to become truely useful. Hopefully we can contribute to this discussion.

Mario gives a thumbs up to vista for implenting tagging in the upcoming version of the vista OS. (and not much else). Hopefully josh can wait for it.

So far, all I can give Microsoft credit for (from what I’ve seen) is implementing tagging for their file system. Nice move. Easy transition to non-hierarchical file systems.

This was demonstrated at NorthernVoice earlier this month, and although they showed how all docs, media files, apps or whatever will be ‘taggable’, we did not see theUI that will be used to scan “My Computer” from a tagsonomy perspective. I wouldn’t mind having a crack at that myself.

Technorati Tags: power of words tagcloud taggin as interface tom waits

Took another stab at the cloud of related tags with some additional CSS  used to modify the position of the tags.
Now the releated tags form a circle around the main tag.

Not all that interesting yet, but im treating these as preliminary sketches and proofs of concept.

Technorati Tags: AI Summit delicious API folksonomy tagging

Part two in a series of CA and SO descriptions. This time it’s Two-Dimensional CA, looking specifically at Conway’s Game of Life.

The Cell:

Like the cell in one-dimensional CA, The Cell in two-dimensional CA is a binary organism, having only two states:on and off/alive and dead.
These states can be represented though ones and zeros or visually through dark and light dots.

The Petri Dish

Two-dimensional CA live in a grid that extends to the left and right as well a as up and down, like a chessboard. In Two-dimensional CA, a cell can have a maximum of eight neighbours, the cell directly to the left, the cell directly to the right, the cell directly above, the cell directly below and the four cells on each angle.

The Rules

• If a cell has fewer than two living neighbours, it dies.
• If a live cell has more than three living neighbours, it dies
• If a dead cell has three or more live neighbours it comes to life.
• If a cell has only two living neighbours, its state remains unchanged.

For the most part Conway’s game of life is very unstable, cells and structures disappear with alarming frequency. Eventually the the petri dish achieves an endpoint, usually an empty grid, or a series of smaller permanent stable or repeating patterns.

Here’s a really old Flash example I built a couple of years ago.

Technorati Tags:

I spent most of yesterday setting up my own delicious api reader in PHP, and it’s working pretty well thanks to the nice XML structure supplied by the delicious crew. It was much easier than I originally anticiapted, at least the initial phase was.  Currently I am just reading from the results returned from the del.icio.us/api/posts/all? request, then moving the data into my own structure, which currently looks like this:
tags= [tagName[count:Num, neighbours:[tagName:count]]]
The current version provides the exact same information that delicious does - a tag cloud and related tags, without any information on the resource. That of course will come next.
The big deal here (at least for me) is that I own the data and I can manipulate it. Its not pretty, functional, or finished  but it’s mine.

Based on the way the API works you will need to send your delicious username and password before you can see the list.
I do not store, file, or even peek at your username/passwords. I send them to delicious and then eat the piece of paper they were written on.

Technorati Tags: AI Summit delicious API folksonomy

via Headshift. Alistair Davidson proposed a standardised syntax for multi-tag queries
in Web 2.0 applications, as an essential step towards the Semantic Web.

Have to get this stuff down as it comes out. There is a new category,  Rules, that will list examples of solutions and sites developers are coming up with to add structure and/or meaning to the process of tagging. Alot of smart people are innovating with tags these days and even keeping up with the state of the art will prove challenging  For instance I have not even tried the tag
“unions” that Del.icio.us supports via the + operator yet.

Alistair calls tags “free-text Post-Its“, I love it. He notes the growing issues for programmers using the tag java (poor guys), and how its meaning is diluted depending on the context of the resource being tagged.  del.icio.us, technorati, flickr
What he comes up with is far more technically focussed than ur direction. But I tik these are some important rules to take into account. The machines rules. How often are all the advanced search operators used on google?

What is needed, therefore, is a generalised boolean syntax for tag URLs. A Tag Query Language, if you like. It must have certain properties :

Properties

1. It should be able to be used in a URL - so no “/” characters, no “.” characters, etc.
2. It should be human-interpretable - a person should be able to look at a TQL query string and work out what was intended without too much effort.
3. It should be simple - Web 2.0 is showing us that the simple solution is usually the best, and something which requires too much time to implement is just not going to be widely adopted.
4. It should be easily translatable into standard SQL
5. It must not expose the implementing website to potential SQL Injection attacks

headshift

Technorati Tags: headshift syntax tag syntax tagging

first post from performancing, which i hope will make my blogging tasks more managable.

We will be exploring collaborative tagging in our workshops, and have been looking for interesting examples to guide the design of them. Anton found STEVE earlier and going through some of their references i was happy to see The ESP Game mentioned.  Such a simple HHCI , yet so much data was gleaned.

We began designing our own workshops to be a much lower fidelity, (think post-its) but i think some game element, even a superficial one might drive user participation. In applying rules to the act of tagging, a game provides lots of opportunities to design relationships between users, the information, and the interface.  Imagine if you will, (massive?)multi-player Tic TAG Toe. (try this classic version for now, http://www.tictactoe.com/)

Tic Tac Toe is a Zero Sum Game,  and as i surf through the wikipedia links this could be a can o worms.

Technorati Tags: game Tic Tac Toe Tic TAG Toe