Tag based UI concept

When I first started using Steemit.com I found the interface or primary navigation is anchored around the concept of a 'feed' as most social media platforms that implements a 'subscription/follow' feature will to help manage the contents.

We can see that in Busy.org (this is beta version I am using) the primary navigation is a little bit different but the home page link to the Feed suggests that this is still a strong feature of the interface.

I think one of the challenges of building an interface around feeds, that is, using the concept of feeds to structure the rest of the interface is due to the fact that there is no clear point of reference. The Steem blockchain regards authored content (i.e. posts and comments) in a similar way but we can see different strategies for presenting the content in Steemit.com (as Feed, Blog, Comment, Replies) compared to Busy.org (as Feed, News, Replies, Bookmarks).

But actually News in Busy.org is the equivalent of the home page of Steemit.com, where you can show content sorted by different parameters (I assume trending is by upvotes and new is by date or something similar):

I can go into other examples where the point of reference changes depending on which section of the website you are on, such as when the content is separated into Comments and Replies in Steemit.com or just consolidated into Replies in Busy.org. Another example is having a Blog + Feed to distinguish between contents you author/curate versus content authored/curated by other people in Steemit.com compared to the Bookmark feature in Busy.org that lets save content from other authors.

My point is that even though the content created share certain characteristics, I think that the key to making a more fluent/consistent user interface might require looking at not just applying the usual design systems that we see on social media websites and tweak it a little bit to suit the distributed nature of blockchain based applications, but how to combine both in an optimal way that might require some out of the box thinking.

I had previously come across a very interesting application that attempted what I would describe as a 'tag based' file management system called TagSpaces (https://www.tagspaces.org/). And rather than trying to create a typical tree-based structure for navigation content, it actually allowed users to create and combine tags to come up with their own structure for viewing content. Here is a screenshot of the user interface:

The concept of using tags as a kind of 'meta data' that you tag onto a piece of content is still the predominant view of managing a large amount of information that is collected from different sources. In the age of 'big data' and its 5 Vs (volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value), the traditional file systems that were created for managing information prior to the age of the internet simply struggles to present this more complex picture of the information that we have to process and consume.

In TagSpaces you can apply tags to folders and use it to create a much more complex structure, and when you add this to tags that you apply to documents and individual pieces of content then you have a more flexible way of managing information across different dimension. You can also create collections of tags that correspond to a particular attribute that you want to organize or tag contents.

How does this work with Steemit.com or Busy.org exactly? Well there are already two different types of tags that exist used in the actual content, these being the "#" topic and "@" author tags, and they can be used as a shortcut key or auto-fill option (so we can avoid the typos for topic channels and authors in the future). Here's how the author tags might work:

And when you type in the text it will search for users with matching names

Then simply click Add to insert this tag into the posts that you create.

Topic Tags can work the same way but you add it to the 'tag' field of the post, or wherever you want to mention the topic

But as I said before, I think the 'magic' of a tag based system comes from being able to manage and search your curated or posted contents in a much more dynamic and powerful way, so lets take a look at an example:

What if instead of having to guess what the content of a post is by looking at the thumbnail image (and when there isn't one) I can tag the type of content contained with the post?

What if instead of saving thing to the Bookmark and having to trawl through everything I can just search by the ratings?

And what about something similar to the 'snippets/auto-text' feature that is context sensitive and can save you from a lot of unnecessary searching and typing. Adding time, location and other information to your posts to help manage and search through information would be such a breeze.

Still not enough? How about being able to create your own tag groups? And for the newbies you can also import tags from people if you think they have a really cool workflow or system for managing their content?

To me the possibilities seem endless, and these are just other ideas from TagSpace that can also be applied to Busy.org:

Priority Tags would be excellent for those posts that you really need to get onto writing or reading, and Progress Tags would replace a draft page, plus you can also define progress if you have multiple drafts on the go!

I am not much of a UI designer and even less of a programmer, but as a user of both Steemit.com and Busy.org I find it difficult to have to keep changing the way I work based on which platform is down at what time. With a tag based system I think there is a solution that will potentially work for a lot of people because it is up to each person how they want to apply the tag system, and a basic tag system can be defined to encapsulate the different ways content is grouped and presented in Steemit.com and Busy.org.

I believe that a new and exciting platform like Busy.org deserves a new and exciting way to manage the information in a way that reflects our individuality and preferences.

It would also take advantage of the three column design and bigger screens that we have on our desktop these days (I'll have to think about what the mobile view looks like though). So I think the vision would be something like this:

I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback/comments/suggestions on this idea.

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Open Source Contribution posted via https://utopian.io

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