Since their inception, we’ve seen some excellent implementations and some disastrous ones. The excellent implementations quickly lead users to the content they seek, and help discover items they didn’t know existed or wouldn’t have found otherwise. When implemented poorly, the tags just confuse the users and clutter the interface, not adding any value or meaning.

In this issue of UIEtips, Stephanie Lemieux explores what tagging might look like inside of the enterprise firewall. How does it work when we’re applying tags to serious business content? If you’re wondered whether there are benefits to a folksonomy on an intranet, you’ll want to read her article.

Read the article Social Tagging and the Enterprise—Does Tagging Work at Work?

Stephanie is taking tagging further, exploring the implementation patterns for both public-facing sites and enterprise content, in her upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World. Learn more about the March 10 webinar and Stephanie’s insights and ideas for successful implementations.

Get the details on Tagging with Folksonomies in a Taxonomy World.

Have you explored tagging within your organization? What have you found that works? What should others avoid? We’d love to hear your experiences below.

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

The abundance and variety of search implementations present a challenge to designers: How do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they’re seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn’t have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you’re working on providing the best experience with your site’s search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you’ve learned—you’ll want to implement Peter and Mark’s ideas right away.

This winter, Peter’s new book, Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, will hit the stores. But you won’t have to buy it, because as soon as it comes off the press, we’ll send you a copy—just because you attended this seminar.

Thanks to Peter, Mark, and the great folks at Endeca, we can include this must-have book. We’ve seen an early draft and we’re amazed by Peter’s talent to explain these topics so clearly. The beautiful full-color illustrations and screen shots don’t hurt either.

Register your team today, and reserve your copy of Search Patterns.

Do you use design patterns? What questions do you have about them? Where do you go, or where would you go to find them? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

People come to your site to get the information they need, by exploring, discovering, and making comparisons. You want them to successfully sift through all of your content, quickly and effectively. Faceted search delivers on that promise, in spades, but not without good planning and a great strategy.

Pete and Daniel will show you before-and-after looks at e-commerce, media, corporate, and intranets sites. They will teach you the essentials you need to launch your own faceted search system and
discuss the pitfalls you’ll want to prepare for.

Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface
with Pete Bell & Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca
Thursday August 20, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation
Register to join us on August 20, watch Pete’s preview, or learn more details here.

Special Offer – Be one of the first to get Daniel Tunkelang’s new book, Faceted Search (published by Morgan and Claypool) for free when you register for this UIE Virtual Seminar. Choose from book or PDF version. Details to follow once you register for the UIE Virtual Seminar. Read an excerpt from the book here.

If you’re knee-deep in implementation, or working with folks who are designing for facets, be sure to set time aside for this presentation. And remember to look out for your free book after the presentation!

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. Is your organization considering the move to faceted search? What will you do differently? We’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and concerns. Please share your thoughts below.

(If you aren’t familar with faceted search, Stephanie Lemieux wrote a great introduction, Designing for Faceted Search,  in a previous UIEtips.)

But setting up a system for faceted search has its challenges. Do it poorly and you will confuse and frustrate your users. They won’t reap the benefits of the design.

In today’s UIEtips, Daniel Tunkelang discusses the concerns designers face when building out the front-end of a faceted search system. He discusses where and when the design should present facets to the users and options for organizing them. If you’re embarking on a faceted search implementation, you’ll definitely enjoy this article.

Today’s article is an excerpt from Daniel’s new book: Faceted Search. You can get this book free when you register for Daniel and Pete’s UIE Virtual Seminar, also called Faceted Search. I recommend you gather your team together on August 20, 2009 and watch this seminar, as you’ll get some real insights in the challenges and tricks to implementing Faceted Search. Lots of stuff the search vendor’s salesman probably didn’t tell you. 

Have you planned out a faceted search interface to your data? What were some of the hurdles you ran into? How did you work through them? Share your experiences with us below.

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Last week we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux of Earley & Associates, a premier builder of industrial-strength taxonomies for organizations large and small. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Seth and Stephanie to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in taxonomies, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of taxonomy know-how.

During the podcast, I asked Seth and Stephanie to dig into these questions:

• What are “business drivers” and how do they relate to building a taxonomy?
• In the development of taxonomies, how do you avoid being bogged down in an organization’s structure and keep focused from a navigational vantage point?
• Do you use Personas to help develop your taxonomies? Why? How?
• How early do you integrate usability testing in the development process?
• We had many questions about Earley’s experience working with a global enterprise taxonomy system that they developed for Motorola. Stephanie discussed that process.
• How should you think about long term curation of your taxonomy?
• …and more

Tune in to get some tips on how to tune up your taxonomy. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

(I once bumped into the editor of my favorite magazine and told him his publication lived on the back of my toilet. His response? ”That’s the highest praise you can ever give a magazine editor! Thank you! You’ve made my day.”)

While it’s great to always have something to read nearby, finding a specific item is close to impossible. There’s no order or organization that even comes close to making anything easy to find. Not ideal for someone who has made their living helping people create usable information resources, eh?

Now, imagine if every other asset in the house (such as clothing, dishes, or financial records) was equally as randomly distributed. The house would grind to a halt.

Yet many organizations find themselves almost in that situation daily. Every week, we hear from clients who have Intranets where every user complains how hard it is to find the things they need to do their job.

Enter the taxonomy. Once you start to organize the information, you need to identify the right way to classify and store that information. And taxonomies go well beyond just the categories on a web site. Done well, they become a tool that you can use repeatedly to structure and optimize almost every business practice.

In today’s UIEtips, we have an article about one such application: using a taxonomy to create faceted navigation. Stephanie Lemieux,from Earley & Associates, shares her tips on what facets are and how teams can implement them effectively. If you’ve been wondering about this guided approach to navigation, this article is a must read.

By the way, we’re very excited about Stephanie Lemieux and Seth Earley’s upcoming UIE Virtual Seminar, New Ways to Think About Taxonomy: The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization. This is our first seminar on this critical topic — a must for anyone who needs to improve the way their business is managing their critical information assets. Space is limited so register early for the May 7 seminar.

Have you implemented faceted navigation in your web site? What challenges did you run into? Share your experiences below.