Masterthesis Joan Boixados

Abstract

With the advent of theWeb 2.0, where social communities share large amounts of resources such as bookmarks (Delicious.com) or photographs (Flickr.com), the need for a flexible yet structured knowledge organization system becomes obvious. In this manner, social tagging systems, systems that enable users to collaboratively manage collections of information resources via the assignment of text labels to the resources, have become popular in recent years. Nonetheless, navigation among tags and resources has been found to be limited in these systems. Therefore, a new wave of social tagging systems has appeared to try to find solutions to this limitation. However, the design of an interface for innovative tagging systems that incorporate many new concepts unknown to the users is not trivial. In this work, we conduct an exhaustive evaluation of the interface of one of these new approaches, the multi-faceted context-dependant knowledge organization system TACKO. For such purpose, we first provide the necessary background knowledge concerning social tagging systems, the usability evaluation methods we used and the TACKO tagging system, object of our evaluation. Subsequently, we proceed to present the plan and execution of our evaluation of TACKO’s interface with the help of 16 testers, to finally present an exhaustive analysis of the interface, concluding with a list of the main found usability issues as well as possible improvements to solve them.

Slides of the final Presentation: Slides Final Presentation Joan.pdf