[LW Team] Request for User-Interviews about Tagging/Search/Wikis
How to Sign Up
If you’re up for talking to me about your experience with or thoughts about tagging, please schedule a call: https://calendly.com/ruby_lesswrong
You don’t have to have super sophisticated UI design thoughts to help out here. I’m interested into talking to any one who uses sites to intentionally find content via tagging and search. Let me understand how you use these systems and why. Do you use subreddits? Google Scholar? StackExchange? Tumblr? Whatever. Experience with any of those will be informative to hear about.
I’m available throughout the week. My default is 60-minute calls, but I can do both more and less. If none of the listed times work, feel free to message me via Private Message, Intercom, or ruby@lesswrong.com and we can find something.
Also free to simply comment on this post with any thoughts if that’s easiest.
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Ben Pace and I are also both happy to talk generally about the site. Ben does 45-minute calls on Thursday mornings and you can book with him here.
A Little Preview
Design prototype of tags at the bottom of the post page
Very early version of the tags page
Details
The LessWrong team is currently in the thick of designing new information organization systems for the site. We’re focused primarily on the tagging system right now, however it is intimately connected with search/wiki/filtering and other systems that will interact closely with it.
To help us get the design right, I’m interested in chatting with a wide variety of people how about how they’d relate to these systems and how they access content on the site in general.
Who I Want to Talk To
To give a few examples, I’m interested in talking to people of the following types (but others too):
People who use LessWrong to routinely find new interesting content to read.
People with a lot of experience using other sites with similar tagging/search systems, e.g. StackExchange, WikiHow, Reddit, University Database Systems, etc. I mean, most websites have this in some form.
People who do research using academic journals/articles; generally people who do research work that builds on past work.
People who used LW1.0′s tagging and Wiki systems back in the day.
That’s a short list of the top of my head, but probably if you’re interested in these systems then you can help us out with your thoughts.
Also it doesn’t matter if you’re a new user or infrequent user. If you have thoughts on these topics, it’d be helpful to hear from you.
The Kinds of Questions I Want to Ask You
What would you want from the LessWrong information organization systems?
Which things do you currently like?
Which things do you currently hate?
Which things do you wish you had?
What’s your experience with these systems elsewhere? Are there any you really like?
What do you think of <insert prototype/mock-up of designs we’re considering>?
Can I get you to try out a few tools while I watch?
Also happy to generally chat about people’s experience with LessWrong and what they’d like from the site.
Sample of Design Questions We’re Trying to Answer
What are goals/use cases people would want tagging (+wiki + search) to help them do?
What’s the relationship of tagging to wikis and search?
How should tags be organized among themselves? Hierarchy of tags? Tagging of tags?
Should we a few tags or a lot? What should the process be for creating new tags?
Which tags should we have?
How do we handle deduplication of tags and people find all related content of interest?
i’m a tag wrangler for the archiveofourown, so if you’re interested in learning more about human-assisted organizational structures, feel free to slide into my dms (although I might take a while to respond).
here’s an explainer put out by wired on what i and other volunteers do: https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/
i don’t think it’s a stretch to say that ao3 has the best tagging system on the internet from a user perspective, but you don’t get a system that good unless you pay the price, and take the tradeoffs. but yeah, just putting this on your radar if it wasn’t :)
eta: I don’t expect this to be a feasible solution for lw, this is more to broaden your scope on what’s out there so you can make a better informed decision at the end.