Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

The person writing this is confusing their personal opinion for objective UX fact. It is commonly accepted that only highly organized users use features like tags. The vast majority of people simply don't. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this is hostile it's possible Chrome and Docs just have a wider user-base than this particular author.

View on HN

People will very much use organizing features if you provide them. Whether it's groups for icons, folders for files, labels for e-mails, tags and colors for documents, or drawers for socks - most people seem to recognize that being organized is a virtue, and will attempt it to the extent it is possible and convenient.

Not giving features for self-organization is a choice.

Do you have some basis for these assertions? Personally I agree with the GP but it's personal anecdata only. I would never consider using tags (or a sock drawer) and in my experience working with others with collaboration tools that use tags, there might be one person who is keen in them but they are never widely used. I think this backs up the GPs point that yes, some may find it useful, but it's not necessarily a "must have" that the majority are looking for, or even would use if it was splashed in their faces.

You don't backlink your socks to color family and iconography? Heathen!

Bookmarks are shit for a variety of reasons. Far better to archive pages with images or PDFs. Link rot is so pervasive that just maintaining bookmarks is a waste of time. Tagging, sorting, and annotating files on storage you control is far more reliable.

Google is just trying to help users realize that the web is a bad source for organized information. Google sells expensive clicks to personal injury lawyers off of titanic spam plantations of SEO content —- their mission is orthogonal to the organization of information.

Except Bookmarks and Docs have folders already so the question isn't "no organization" vs "organization" but "tags" vs "folders." This book for example cites data that the majority of users prefer hierarchical organization: https://books.google.com/books?id=EO91DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=...

Adding tags has a chance of causing user confusion, UI congestion and impact on existing tools (in the case of Google Drive) so it's not a free thing to do.

> This book for example cites data that the majority of users prefer hierarchical organization: https://books.google.com/books?id=EO91DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=...

Based on the snippet linked, not exactly thst.

For example one of the thing the book says is users of earlier Windows versions used hierarchical structures.

To which I point out: the only alternative wasn't tags but a flat non-hierarchical lack of structure.

Another thing: The Gmail team got it kind of right, they introduced hierarchical tags.

Sometimes one solution is obviously better and you just need to get the knowlegde out.

Other times there are good reasons to keep both: I personally very much want to have both folders and tags.

At no point should one however take the modern ux trick: hide the power tool, use the fact that no one use it anymore as proof that no one wants it and then remove it.

I don't even think it's about organization, more aesthetic sensibilities. Why would anyone want to have special folder icons? "Because it looks nice" is the only possibility that occurs to me. I probably have over 1000 bookmarks myself, but I can't think of why I would want to "tag" a bookmark. Tags can be useful for finding new content, but if I bookmark a sit I probably know enough about it that I wouldn;t benefit from a tag.

The benefit of tags is that a single item can have multiple tags, so you're no longer constrained by having to decide on a specific folder hierarchy to organize them in. You can replace "folders" with tags entirely and still use tags as folders if you want, with the option of storing an item "in multiple folders" (give it multiple tags). Gmail has worked like this for a while: the inbox is just a filter which displays emails tagged with "inbox", which makes it even more confusing and inconsistent that Google's bookmarks and documents don't support this.

I suspect it's exactly because GMail supports it. Their data indicates that it's not a user friendly feature for the majority of users (ie: why labels can be nested since 2011) but it's grandfathered into GMail. GMail as I see it began with pure tags, spent a lot of effort trying to get people to use them and then ended up with quasi-folders.

It obviously is not user-friendly when you deprecate folders in favor of tags. That’s the thing which only a software developers mind could dream into reality. When they invent nested labels, it should scream “man that’s folder, folder, damned folder”. But it doesn’t.

Everything is a tag, why not right? They already have: everything is a list, everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a process. How much “everything is a” failures they need before realizing that these ideas were… obsessions I guess?

Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?

> Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?

Exactly.

I accomplish this by butting the same bookmark in multiple folders. In my file structure I do this with symlinks, but a bookmark is pretty much just a link anyway.A tag is pretty much the same as just a parallel folder, right?

The whole point of being able to tag items in a hierarchical folder structure is to not have to manually find and update every duplicate copy of your bookmark when you want to change or delete it.

A few times a year I update a bookmark.

Since my bookmarks use proper tags I just update it once.

If I kept multiple copies in multiple folders I'd have to update multiple bookmarks in multiple folders.

> if I bookmark a site I probably know enough about it that I wouldn't benefit from a tag.

The gulf between this and my own use of bookmarks is so, so vast.

I bookmark because I want to have something as a reference, or come back to it later (especially "bookmark all tabs").

I often think "Maybe I bookmarked this thing that I remember a few details of... hope those details are in the title, or that I happen to recognize the title!"

I often find that I've bookmarked the same site or page multiple times, because when I ran across it, I couldn't easily notice that I already had it saved.

> I probably have over 1000 bookmarks myself, but I can't think of why I would want to "tag" a bookmark.

I have 8000+ bookmarks.

https://pinboard.in/u:eitland/

I can mostly find anything I want within a few minutes. Oh, and I pay for archiving so there's a chance I can read it even if the link rots.

Not having the ability sort bookmarks by date in the bookmark manager is objectively bad UX for users.

That majority user might never visit the bookmarks again once bookmarked and would likely use Google to search for the website again. So Google has incentive to not improve bookmarking, Though I'm not claiming that's the case.

I do agree with the other comments that if there are some features which solves some real problems[1] even the majority users would use it.

Bookmarks can help solve some new age problems too, I recently found phished website of our Income Tax site as a top result in Google[2] and those using bookmark to visit such sites which we use once a year could have prevented from getting phished.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/57-i-forget-my-web-bookmarks-qu... (Disclaimer: I run this)

[2] https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1409761416865746956

I wish Youtube (and Youtube Music) had tags. Or at least a way to manage albums. It'd be nice to track "#ListenFromPitchfork" and "#ListenFromTheWire" to albums so I could manage sources.

If not tags, then SOMETHING.

It’s absurd to think that any and all suggestions mentioned here won’t be continually coming up in feedback or testing sessions. Is it more likely that Google have negligent designers, or they design for business goals?

Googles products are very confusing, not just the bookmarks but Google docs as well, or the workspace tools. I agree their UX leaves much to be desired, and if I had to bet 10 to 1 an aesthetic skin would be on the horizon quicker than any functional improvement

Dave Lynam (the person) is totally correct. Stripping organisational features is against UX.

The belief in the 2010s was that UX design was these pastel-coloured care bears that care deeply about the emotional well-being of people clicking things. And the golden rule was to reduce complexity, while weirdly also hobbling control over what the business logic slurped up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com