Thought & Theory

via crazyegg.com

I remember when I went to the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco last year and Kevin Rose @ Digg.com elaborated on why he chose not to use tagging on his site. I really love the idea of tagging so I was always curious why he chose a category-based architecture.

Five minutes into his presentation he goes on to explain that when it came down to it, tagging didn’t help the everyday user of the site. In their case it would’ve fragmented the information too much and it would be hard for the user to find what they wanted. I think his decision showed a lot of discipline because they didn’t blindly follow what the 2.0 crowd was doing. Although, its ironic since their site is about wisdom of the crowds.

Now, I didn’t choose to use a category based system just because Digg was using one. I’d be missing the point completely if I did that. But here is what we did instead to help us make a decision.

First, I spent a good week asking various experts key questions, reading Bokardo’s Blog and reading countless articles about the psychology of tagging and how it worked. At that point it really seemed like tagging would be the ideal architecture but I had one more thing to consider. The everyday users.

So, I took a second to think about our target demographic (25 - 50 year olds) for Only Human. As a personal experiment, I analyzed what normal people do when they come to a site using a tagging based navigation. They freeze over the overwhelming amount of choices. It doesn’t make sense to the average user, and most people give up and just go to another site.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of tagging. Its an incredible innovation and I personally like using it on sites like flickr.com and del.icio.us. But, the site and its users have to come first over my own personal preferences.

So even with all the articles and success stories of tagging based sites, I made the decision that our core users would find the site much simpler if there were a structured taxonomy instead of a loose, fragmented tagging system. Now we could be wrong in the future, but so far according to our stats, it seems that it was the right decision.