Sorting, Tagging and Social Information Architecture

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Sorting, Tagging and Social Information
Architecture

• Rashmi Sinha
• Uzanto MindCanvas

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or the missing chapter in the Polar Bear Book
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The man who could not sort
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Cognitively Speaking
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How categorization works

• Artifacts of digital categorization
• Analysis Paralysis
• Balancing your scheme
• Over time category boundaries change, labels
  obsolete
• Systems hide item mistakes costly

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How tagging works
Multiple concepts are activated
Tag it! Note all concepts
Object worth remembering (article, image)

• Maps to cognitive process
• Reduced load
• Fun
• Self-feedback, social feedback
• No balancing of scheme

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Distinguish Input and Output

• Categorization
• Giving Input putting email into folders
• Using Output Navigating using menu system
• Tagging
• Giving input tagging emails
• Using output Using tagcloud to find information

Focus on input
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Sorting
Tagging

• Higher cognitive cost
• Richer data
• Harder to aggregate socially

• Lower cognitive cost
• Less rich data
• Easy to aggregate socially

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How to reduce cognitive cost of categorization

• Better interaction design
• Items dont hide
• Flat schemes?
• Non-exclusive categories?

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When to use sorting or tagging?

• Focus on User Research

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Typical IA approach to user approach
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Using tags for User Research

• Tags for Apple
• Mac
• osx
• ipod
• software
• itunes
• music
• history
• technology
• windows
• Macintosh
• hardware
• Calculate co-occurrence. Do hierarchical cluster
  analysis.

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Hybrid Approach TagSorting

• Gather tags from del.icio.us
• Ask users to do card-sorting

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Other hybrid approaches?
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Other research that sorting is useful for
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Understand how people think

• Though called by other names, many
  consumer-research topics directly involve
  cognitive structures, including product
  perceptions, brand attitudes, brand-attribute
  beliefs, brand personality, and consumer
  expertise. As consumers acquire new knowledge and
  interrelate it with existing knowledge in memory,
  they are assumed to form cognitive structures in
  memory. These cognitive structures or mental
  models represent the interpreted meanings of a
  product or a brand.
• Gerald Zaltman,
• How Customers Think, 2003

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Product Positioning

• How would a device with X features fit into
  peoples minds?
• How would they think about it?
• What product category would it fit in?
• What type of pricing expectations would they
  have?
• What type of marketing is needed?

For a new handheld device
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Consensus Building Techniques KJ Method

• Popular in Japan
• Allows groups to quickly reach a consensus on
  priorities with subjective, qualitative data.
• Example
• Each member list obstacles in work (on stickies)
• Puts it up on wall
• Put similar items together as a group
• Participants name groups
• Assign priority to groups
• Average across people

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MindMapping for Stakeholder Analysis

• Map concepts across multiple stakeholders
• Trochims method
• Ask stakeholders to sort statements related to
  issue
• Rate importance of each statement
• Create groups through Cluster Analysis
• Depict importance of each group

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Why tagging is sometimes appropriate
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The Web has become social!

• Findings from Pew Internet Report
• The internet email play important role in
  maintaining dispersed social networks.
• People use internet to maintain contact with
  sizable social networks.
• People use internet to seek out others in their
  networks when they need help.
• Concept of Networked Individualism (connections
  are individual-to-individual)

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People hang out on the web just for fun!

• On any given day, about 40 million internet users
  go online just for fun or to pass the time.

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Tags make web a shared experience

• Tags give you community feeling of others
  around you
• Other social characteristics
• Social Play
• Stalking
• Imitation
• Gossip

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Social Transmission of Information

• Concepts get formed, become popular
• AJAX meme
• Web 2.0 meme

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Why tagging, why now?

• Pace of change (Stewart Brand)
• No time for consensus to emerge

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We ignored the social

• Library Science, Cognitive Psychology not enough
• Need to draw from social disciplines

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No focus on early adopters

• Focus on non tech-savvy users

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Designers like control

• Design of social system means letting go
• Its messy, chaotic, complex

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You dont need Jonathan Ive for myspace,
craigslist or tagworld
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but this is not the future
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Menus and TagClouds

• Menus
• Structured
• Stable over time
• Comprehensive
• TagClouds
• Unstructured
• Relatively unstable
• Not comprehensive
• Let current stuff bubble to top

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Design of Social Systems

• Serve the individuals selfish goal
• Create a symbiotic relationship between
  individual and social
• When should individual feel alone, when part of a
  group?
• How to encourage social sharing?
• How much mimicry to encourage?
• How to accommodate local groups?
• How to encourage expression of alternative
  viewpoints?
• When to introduce social networks?
• How to encourage wise crowds?
• How to augment navigation with tags?

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Things to try

• Create an account on myspace
• Read Emergence, Wisdom of Crowds
• Play a Multiplayer Online Game (World of
  Warcraft, Second Life)
• Play with an API
• Think about what is fun on the web

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Emailrashmi_at_uzanto.com

• URLS
• www.rashmisinha.com
• www.uzanto.com