Thursday, January 26, 2017

categorization - Categories or tags based navigation ?


I am not sure if tags based navigation would be easier for users. In our web we categorize software (like download.com) and categories maybe are hard to understand.



Answer



I personally prefer tagging to using categories.


The advantages of categories:



  • clearly defined

  • could be hierarchical

  • static (in most cases)



The advantages of using tags:



  • unstructured

  • could be very easy user-defined


The advantages of using tagging is that the amount of tags something can have is unlimited, and ultimately users can tag items themselves. This is allows for a nice level of user-interaction, and your data will improve by each user adding a tag.


Navigation based on tags is then actually searching on any combination of tags, and will allow to get a very precise wanted collection of results. E.g. very good examples of succesfull tagging are (imo):



  • stackexchange

  • gmail


  • flickr


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