Tags sorting or weighting
Reported by Robby Russell | October 1st, 2007 @ 08:36 PM | in Feature Requests
I'm a fan of tags when executed well. I like that we can tag tickets in Lighthouse. My problem is not really to do with how we add tags, but how we can quickly scan existing tags.
I think that with one simple change in the code, you can increase the effectiveness of tags and reduce duplicates (pluralization, typos, or similar ones)...
Exhibit A: Creating/updating a ticket
Exhibit B: List of tags on the ticket overview page:
So, what's my problem? The tag cloud doesnt' appear to be in any valuable order. It's a mix-match of tags with that don't give me any sense of weight in the system. It's very difficult to scan across all the tags right now because your brain takes a long time to process a bunch of unorganized words.
The solution: Alphabetical tags. Our brains know how indexes work, they know how to read through an alphabetical list of words really quickly.
For extra credit... find a way to add some weight to popular tags within a project/milestone.
Comments and changes to this ticket
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Robby Russell October 1st, 2007 @ 08:38 PM
Here, I can help you out...
...tags.sort_by { |tag| tag['name'] };-)
whimpers
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rick October 2nd, 2007 @ 11:29 AM
- → State changed from “new” to “open”
It's actually sorted by usage, but it seems more folks want alphabetical. I can't wait for the LOLBUG when you have 4000 tags then...
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Robby Russell October 2nd, 2007 @ 11:44 AM
bq. "I can't wait for the LOLBUG when you have 4000 tags then..."
Hah. hopefully people never have that many tags... and besides, it should cut off on most popular or something when it reaches a certain count.
What we're doing on a few projects is... grabbing X most popular and then sorting that by name. Adding some weight (visually) can help keep this easy to scan when sorted alphabetically.
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Will October 2nd, 2007 @ 08:56 PM
- → Milestone changed from “” to “Feature Requests”
- → Assigned user changed from “rick” to “Justin Palmer”
I've always been a fan of alphabetical...weighting im impartial about, doesnt bother me either way
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Wilson Bilkovich February 29th, 2008 @ 02:34 PM
How about sorting alphabetically, and using text or background color to specify popularity?
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Will March 3rd, 2008 @ 02:54 PM
It's possible the tags system will see some revision very soon. I'm not 100% sure what Rick and Justin have up their sleeve as far as the tags go, but I'd say it's safe to say some new organization for it is in the works. I'd personally love to see an alphabetized order.
Wilson -- I like the idea of the colors for weighting, I've seen it done before and it works pretty well. I for one don't really need a weighted tags system inside LH, so I'll settle for whatever I can get. Hopefully its starts with "A" and ends with "Z"
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rick March 3rd, 2008 @ 10:01 PM
Yea, we definitely need something in place. Alphabetical is good, but even that tends to break down when you have enough tags.
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Robby Russell April 14th, 2008 @ 06:14 PM
Yea, we definitely need something in place. Alphabetical is good, but even that tends to break down when you have enough tags.
From a purely interaction standpoint.. it's easier to scan a list in alphabetical list. Even with the new styling changes, it's really difficult to scan through and find specific tags... rendering is almost useless.
I try to block the tags from my vision when I'm looking at tags because it stands out like a sore thumb. Sorting this would make my day. ;)
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Justin Palmer April 14th, 2008 @ 06:24 PM
I think alphabetical is the way to go here too. We need some way to manage the "tag noise" though that tends to happen over time. One thing I've though that might work would be to only allow members to add new tags and allow other people to choose from existing tags. It keeps the tag lexicon in the hands of the members.
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Robby Russell April 14th, 2008 @ 07:53 PM
We need some way to manage the "tag noise" though that tends to happen over time.
Yeah, I've not been too exposed to excessive tag noise.. but the sorting is definitely my biggest +1.
In regards to tagging, if they're predefined, I'd consider those keywords instead of tags. Just a terminology different as they'd be selecting from a pre-determined set of keywords instead of tagging.
Example: Select a keyword versus Select a tag.
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Michael Hartl April 15th, 2008 @ 11:12 AM
Right now the number of tags increases monotonically with time. I'm in favor of letting admin users prune the tags that are visible by default. The old tags would still exist somewhere, so people could still search by them, but it would cut down on confusion and clutter if you could suppress the less useful tags.
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Robby Russell April 15th, 2008 @ 12:17 PM
Can we split this ticket up into a few smaller ones? The discussion about pruning/admin-only tags is overloading the original request to just sort them. ;-)
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Justin Palmer April 15th, 2008 @ 02:07 PM
heh, I asked Michael to post in this ticket because we were discussing the administration of tickets. But yeah, we can break it up. I'll reopen your ticket Michael and we'll move the administration discussion over there.
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Matt Mower April 21st, 2008 @ 02:59 PM
Since my ticket #694 is a duplicate of this one I thought it would be worth coming here and adding my voice to the request for alphabetic sorting.
The primary usability problem with the current tags is that you have to scan the entire cloud to be sure that a ticket does/doesn't appear. With alphabetic sorting you can usually guess where about in the cloud a tag will appear and be certain you've found it/won't find it.
The usual trick for indicating popularity is to change the font size but I am at a loss really to know how tag popularity is useful in Lighthouse. Maybe in some view where you are specifically trying to work out which tags people are using a lot, perhaps to drive feature requests.
But in the general UI I don't see the point.
To summarize: please sort tags alphabetically.
Matt.
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Ask Bjørn Hansen June 14th, 2008 @ 08:44 PM
A tag cloud is the great exactly because you can print the tags alphabetized and prioritize the more common tags at the same time.
Looking for a common tag? Just look for the big ones.
Looking for a particular tag? It's in the right place by alphabet, so it's easy to find.
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Matt Mower July 7th, 2008 @ 02:18 AM
- → Tag changed from “” to “design interaction interface tags”
No word on this in weeks.
No sign of alphabetical sorting.
So disappointing.
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Will July 7th, 2008 @ 02:34 AM
Matt -- it's on on the next set of revisions. We're sorry for the delay, but it will be added as soon as possible. It's going to be accompanied with a mass tag editor...
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Ask Bjørn Hansen September 20th, 2008 @ 05:46 PM
- → Tag changed from “design interaction interface tags” to “design interaction interface tags”
Any updates?
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Justin Palmer September 22nd, 2008 @ 01:56 PM
Hey guys,
one of the reasons we just didn't sort the tags alphabetically and be done with it was that some projects have a massive list of tags. The UI doesn't really scale for that many tags. This also presents another problem that some people are likely going to want to prune their tag list globally without going through each ticket. We're in the process of creating a better tagging UI and also a global tag editor.
Sorry for the delay on this. It's something we've talked a lot about and we want to make sure what we implement is the right tool for the job.
If all goes well we should be finishing up sometime this week.
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Ask Bjørn Hansen September 23rd, 2008 @ 11:37 AM
Will the new version be a proper tag cloud or still just a list of words?
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Justin Palmer September 23rd, 2008 @ 11:48 AM
It'll be a proper tag cloud. We'll allow you to sort alphabetically (with visual weighting applied) or by popularity.
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Justin Palmer September 23rd, 2008 @ 12:05 PM
- → Tag changed from “design interaction interface tags” to “@high design interaction interface tags”
- → Assigned user changed from “Justin Palmer” to “rick”
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Wilson Bilkovich September 23rd, 2008 @ 12:16 PM
There may be users for which this solution is not a good fit, but it seems to me that those users are already suffering more than I am, and would not be worse off with sorted tags.
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Robby Russell September 25th, 2008 @ 10:30 AM
What's the ETA on this? If it's going to be a while, might I encourage you to sort the current list as a temporary solution until the new tag cloud is ready? (been poking at this for a year now!) ;-)
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Will September 25th, 2008 @ 11:34 AM
Robby, it's pretty close, we're currently testing inside our staging environment at the moment.
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Justin Palmer September 25th, 2008 @ 11:37 AM
yeah, yeah, it's about time we fix this, right?!?! It's looking like we'll have the tag cloud stuff as early as tomorrow (done already, just needs some cross browser testing and tweaks). Then we'll try to roll out the tag pruning & editing tools next week.
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Justin Palmer September 29th, 2008 @ 03:59 PM
Break open the champagne! We're still making tweaks, though. For instance, right now tags are weighted to the project, but we're going to change this to weight based on open tickets.
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Ellen Harris-Braun October 2nd, 2008 @ 07:20 PM
- → Tag changed from “"@high" design interaction interface tags” to “design featurerequest tags”
- → Assigned user changed from “rick” to “Justin Palmer”
I love the new A-Z tag list! So much easier to use. Thanks!
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