The concept of ‘folksonomic interface development’ was discussed briefly at yesterday’s Creative Coffee Club.
It’s potential thesis juice so I thought I’d scribble down what’s in my head around the subject.
Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.
It captured my imagination because I recently labelled the entire contents of my Gmail inbox (groan) and I struggled to define a useful naming approach. I’d have liked to have been able to select some off-the-shelf labels to get me started.
Either way, my labels are forever in ‘beta’ and there will be plenty more hours spent re-labelling everything when I come up with a new genius way of managing my mail (delete button is probably the best option).
‘Folksonomic’ doesn’t quite describe what I’m interested in however (which is a shame cos ‘folksonomic interface development’ sounds really good!).
What I’m interested in is the notion that users of software might be able to alter the user interface and then share their changes with a community. The key word here is ‘users’. I’m not describing open-source development by software creators.
Imagine if in your favourite piece of software you can re-arrange functions and buttons. You can add and remove functionality. You can skin the interface to make it look pretty. Then you can publish your version of the UI for others to use.
That’s about it for now. Most of that thinking was done on the 159 bus on the way to work this morning. There is much more to be done.
You’ve probably come across the ‘folksonomic’ CSS naming convention discussion amongst Eric Meyer, Andy Clarke et al:
But I’ve posted it here anyway ;)
Comment by Jake Rayson | 12 June 2008, 1:47 pm
What would be cool (and I’ve been playing with it a bit) is to use a lexical approach. If you could relate tags (thesaurus?) and create a hierarchy in tags, you could do some pretty cool stuff.
This was how the nomothetic approach to personality evolved (grouping traits).
Anything similar in the tagging world already?
Comment by Benjamin | 12 June 2008, 2:19 pm
Do/have you read cityofsound? Some of Dan’s writings on adaptability and hackability of software, hardware and urban environments resonate with this. I can’t remember which would be the key entries there but
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2006/05/architecture_an.html
and http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2005/01/adaptation_pers.html would be a good start
Comment by James Stewart | 12 June 2008, 2:52 pm
Lots of food for thought – thanks guys!
The cityofsound.com blog looks fascinating.
Comment by Jenny | 12 June 2008, 3:31 pm
You picked up on Wikipedia when the folksonomy definition of incredibly wrong. Folksonomy is the opposite of collaborative tagging, in fact I coined it to separate it from collaborative tagging. There is a continued confusion between collective and collaborative and Wikipedia has captured that misunderstanding well. For a better understanding try, http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html
What you are looking for in your quest is personalization that can be shared as a theme or interface. This exact thing is done in MySpace and with tools with WordPress. It has been common for many years pre-web going back to Windows themes shared from Windows 95 onward.
Comment by vanderwal | 13 June 2008, 1:24 am
@vanderwal
Thank you for linking me to your definition.
From how I understand it, the folksonomy is the *result* of collective tagging. Is that correct?
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Personalisation is obviously something that has always been considered important by interface designers.
It’s interesting to see the emergence of personalisation of web pages that have traditionally been ’static’ through services such as iGoogle. Now the BBC homepage [bbc.co.uk] is customisable the concept of personalising web pages is in the public consciousness (in the UK at least).
The questions I have are:
1. If an application program allowed you to alter the fundamental GUI would anyone do it?
Bearing in mind limited customisation is already available in application programs that are in daily use (MS Word etc). Will the popularisation of customisable web pages make people expect to be able to customise *everything*?
And,
2. How would you design an interface that was totally re-designable by the user?
I realise this isn’t an example of a folksonomy but – as an aside – what term describes the result of a collective alteration of interface?
Comment by Jenny | 13 June 2008, 9:50 am