Tag Engine - User Centered Navigation and Findability :: PRWD’s UCDcommerce Platform
This article is Part 1 of 4 articles focussing on User Centered Navigation and Findability within PRWD’s E-commerce Platform.
Navigating with Tags
Tagging content to allow users to navigate through a site isn’t a radically new technique, but in particular for e-commerce sites there aren’t currently many examples of where this style of user centered navigation is provided.
For v1.0 of the PRWD E-commerce Platform it was essential that we developed a tagging engine which would provide both our client and shoppers on their site with an intelligent way in which to group, browse and filter products which share similar characteristics.
To give a few examples…
1) Customer Needs To Protect Their Goods
They may be looking for materials which will protect the goods which they will be transporting from their warehouse to their customers business
Traditional E-commerce Navigation
Products which will potentially match these requirements could be located in 3 or 4 different categories, which using traditional navigation methods of browsing categories and sub-categories would make locating them fairly difficult and require a number clicks.
Intelligent PRWD Tag Engine Solution
Using the tag engine, Contact Packaging can specify which of their products, across any categories, fit into this customer requirement and assign the tag ’surface protection’ to each of them
Resulting Customer Findability
By clicking on the ’surface protection’ tag, customers will automatically be presented with all the products across the store which fit this description, providing immediate solutions to whichever type of protective materials they are looking for, whether its bubble wrap, polyethylene foam, hand stretch film or profile foam.
Take a look at the tag results for surface protection within Contact Packaging
2) Customer Needs a Variety of Tools
A warehouse manager may be looking for a variety of tools to be used within various parts of the warehouse, such as strapping tools, tape dispensers and tensioners
Traditional E-commerce Navigation
The customer may try and search for tools and hope that any tools across the site have been indexed with the word tool, and usually this would mean that the word tool would need to feature in the actual title of the product
Intelligent PRWD Tag Engine Solution
Using the tag engine, Contact Packaging can specify which of their products, across any categories, fit into this customer requirement and assign the tag ‘tools’ to each of them, irrespective of whether the product actual states that it is a tool in either its title or description
Resulting Customer Findability
By clicking on the ‘tool’ tag, customers again will automatically be presented with all the products across the store which fit this description, providing immediate solutions to whichever type of tools they are looking for
Take a look at the tag results for tools within Contact Packaging
3) Customer Needs Similar Products
A customer may have browsed to a product page from any of the navigational methods available, and then realised that the product they are looking at isn’t quite what they need
Traditional E-commerce Navigation
The customer can hope that there is an intelligent ‘related products’ feature on the product page which will show them other products more which better suit their needs, or they may perform a new search or try browsing a different category
Intelligent PRWD Tag Engine Solution
Tags which have been added to a particular product are provided on each product page, so along with the related and cross sell products functionality, customers can see what tags have been assigned to that product
Resulting Customer Findability
The customer can click on the tag which best fits with their requirement and then automatically be presented with all other products throughout the store which share this characteristic. It is then expected that the customer can quickly scan the products are decide which of them better fits their requirements.
Continually Evolving PRWD E-commerce Tag Engine
The above examples are specific to the Contact Packaging e-commerce store, but the same tag engine concept works across any size and complexity of e-commerce store (and content driven or business system platform), and in fact this method of navigation is even more useful when there are larger sets of products or content.
As the PRWD E-commerce Platform continually evolves following the launch of v1.0, the intelligence, flexibility and scope of our tag engine will be greatly enhanced to provide an even more powerful and robust way to group, filter and browse products and content.
User generated tags, although not deemed applicable for Contact Packaging, will also be introduced which will add a new dimension to how visitors can personally tag products and browse products based on user-generated tags.
Tags and Multi-Faceted Navigation
Although multi-faceted navigation hasn’t been included in the Contact Packaging e-commerce site, for much larger e-commerce sites we would regard this as a fundamental user centered navigation method. There are very exciting and powerful ways in which out tag engine interacts with and compliments a multi-faceted navigation system and this is something that I will be talking about more in the article on PRWD’s multi-faceted navigation system.
Your comments please…!
I’m very interested to hear about your thoughts on the effectiveness of tag clouds and tags in general as a way of navigating through a sites content by related attributes and meta data. How do you implement tags to assist users in navigating your site content? What % of users interact with tag clouds and related tags? How do tags work alongside your multi-faceted navigation system?
Tags: Findability, retailing, tag engine, UCDcommerce
3:49 pm
28th April 2008
[...] tag clouds using the PRWD tagging engine [...]
4:39 pm
28th April 2008
Just a technical note to say that all tag vs. product matrixes are completed within MySQL only, with the resulting products returned to system. This ensures that the process of finding thousands of products grouped by one or many tags is highly optimised and there is only ever one call to the database.
May seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do it this way.
5:05 pm
28th April 2008
Thanks for that info Sam. As your note confirms the tag engine really is geared towards handling vast’s amount of tag information and the power of the engine will really come to the fore on much larger e-commerce sites.
6:28 pm
28th April 2008
Hi Paul,
I know in systems I’ve been involved with, I’ve seen problems with users entering tags in different cases and spellings, with or without white space. Often you see AJAX powered ’suggest’ tools. Is this something you guys have done or have you found a different solution to managing tags in the back-end?
Do you force users into sticking with upper/lower-case input or save all as lower-case for consistency? Do you allow for multi-word tags or (like del.icio.us) have to make these into a single tags (no spaces)?
Always interesting to see different approaches and understand the reasoning behind them
10:22 am
29th April 2008
Hi Dan,
You are right in thinking that we have implemented an AJAX driven suggest tool in the admin area, which allows the administrator to not only see existing tags for possible ideas but also to simply click any relevant tag in order to assign it to a particular product or dynamic category.
When we introduced our client to the back-end of the platform we informed them that for uniformity tags should be entered in all lowercase, and this is a principal that they have adhered to.
As the tags were going to a highly visible navigation tool for customers, and that for certain attributes and customer situations couldn’t be described in just 1 word, it was imperative that the tags could be multi-word, such as ‘ebay seller’, ’surface protection’, ‘printed adhesive tapes’ etc. Additionally when entering multiple different tags to a individual product the tags needed to be comma separated rather than space separated.
By using commas between each tag, this ensured that multi word tags didn’t need to have hyphens between each word, which ensures on the front end the tags are displayed as natural phrases and not hyphen-separated-tags.
Moving into user generated tags, this presents its own challenges in terms of what access level ie. registered visitor, existing customer etc, a user needs to have in order to be able to create their own tags, along with policing the user generated tags.
I will provide more insight into our methodology for this when we launch a platform which allows for user generated tags.
I hope this has been a useful insight into our approach.
Paul
3:35 pm
29th April 2008
Just to add to those points Paul mentioned. All tag input is forced into lowercase when processed using server-side tools. So even if you typed “MyTaG” it would be stored as “mytag”.
Within the engine, tags are only stored once. A lot of the functionality within the tag class provides methods that check for existing identical tags before registering new ones, and conversely check for existing identical tags when removing one. The engine also generates a tag cloud and performs the searching by tag functionality.
5:59 pm
25th June 2008
[...] tag clouds using the PRWD tagging engine [...]