Usability at del.icio.us
27 September 2007 Great to see the team at del.icio.us using user-centred principles in their product improvement work their product.They've done some usability testing, which is great to hear, and will be incorporating the results in their next version.
If you haven't come across del.icio.us before, I recommend the service. del.icio.us is a way of managing your bookmarks/favourites so that:
- you can easily find something you've lost
- can categorise them through simple tags
- can access your bookmarks from any web-connected computer
- can share them easily with someone else.
The behaviour around bookmarking interests me. I've met people who claim they don't, but those of us that do obviously don't trust ourselves to be able to locate a found site again. Even with the power of Google at our fingertips, if you can't remember what something is called, it can be difficult to find again days or months later. What makes me bookmark is that frustrating feeling when you go looking for something you know you've seen before, but just can't locate it using search.
I've been using del.icio.us for two years now, mostly just to maintain my web bookmarks. It works well and I like the simple, clean interface and the fact I can see it from any computer, at home or at work. It doesn't work for everyone, or so I've read, but one reason why it works for me is because I'm tough on tags. I don't add a new tag to my list unless I really can't use one I've already got. This has helped keep my list of tags short-ish, and I think still of use to me. James Melzer once complained that large tag clouds were useless, and I can see what he means when they get as large as his have.
You may ask how come I can easily re-locate bookmarks in del.icio.us but not find the site in Google? Good question, and I think the answer is tagging. Somehow that and the process around creating them helps me find things again.
One thing I forget to do, is use the power of del.icio.us when researching a topic. Because del.icio.us bookmarks are public, you can search the tags used by others when looking for something. This can be more useful than a keyword Google search, because you can see how many other people have tagged a bookmark and gauge how relevant others have found it. In a world of SEO smoke-and-mirrors and webmaster skull-duggery, del.icio.us can sometimes be more helpful when looking up a topic than a key-word search can. I find the Wikipedia similar in this respect, being a good first-stop for a topic.
I suspect I forget to use the social-power of del.icio.us because I mostly use it for managing my own bookmarks, rather than tapping into the bookmark folksonomy. There are other services that do this for you and let your friends or whoever rate the bookmark links. My primary need is to manage my own bookmarks, so using my mates' bookmarks, or having them rate mine, becomes second priority. In the end, this article by Long tail man Chris Anderson suggests just using yer mates to rate stuff may not the best way to do things anyway.
Labels: usability
posted by Greg on Thursday, September 27, 2007,
