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seeking strategies adopted by users in social tagging systems. It was found that the strategies identified demonstrated highly different popularity and effectiveness. Especially, the most frequently adopted strategy, browsing by resource, was not very effective in helping users find their needed resources; however, the strategy with the highest find-to-collect rate, browsing by tag, only attracted moderate attention from the users. The second purpose of this study was to associate users’ characteristics with their favorite strategies. The results indicate that individual differences among the users preferring different strategies were significant in certain aspects, including their familiarity with the system, resource finding habit, and involvement in the tagging activity. Finally, this study was also interested in the specific traits of users’ information seeking paths in social tagging systems. As revealed by the analysis of the tracks representing the paths, longer visits to the system, during which more pages were accessed, tended to result in more occurrences of resource viewing and collecting. The model generated from these major findings provides useful implications for the design of user-oriented information seeking interfaces in general social tagging systems.
Social tagging systems are more diverse and dynamic information environments than the traditional Web, and people have been tailoring their behavior so as to keep optimum efficiency in information seeking. While search engines still serve an essential role, other approaches to resource finding either are gaining prevalence or have become very prevalent. For the sake of accommodating users’ behavioral changes, all the basic architectural elements, including resource, tag, user, group, and home, etc., should be integrated in the development of social tagging systems.
In particular, the exploitation of tags needs to be promoted and facilitated, due to their remarkable usefulness in directing users to the resources of interest. It is not wise for such systems
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as Discogs and IMDb to ignore the importance of offering users convenient access to tag clouds. Also deserving thoughtful consideration is the construction of system homepages, because encountering on home is an effortless yet satisfactory strategy which can be adopted by any users. The common practice is pushing the recently released, widely discussed, and highly rated information resources on the homepages. But the abundance of resources must be appropriate, or users will be defeated by information overload.
At present, a major functionality missing from most social tagging systems is the customizable control over the use of the systems by the users themselves. Take Douban’s resource pages for example. With no exception, any resource will be presented together with its most frequently attached tags, its individual and group collectors, its co-collected resources, and so on. It is true that the variety of information seeking methods is ensured. But what if a user just wants one of the components, e.g. the tags for browsing by tag? This means that the other components are all noise and they could distract the user’s attention from the component that he or she is really interested in.
One possible solution to such problem is dividing various components into independent modules and giving users the permission to deactivate and reactivate the modules according to their specific needs. That is to say, system designs will be more user-friendly when taking into account the individual differences. If a certain module fails to support users’ information seeking preferences, it can be deactivated. Indeed, their preferences will not keep unvaried forever. For instances, new users’ dependence on the homepage for encountering resources will be alleviated as they spend more time in a system and get more familiar with it, and the “people who like this also like”
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component will become less helpful in recommending new resources as users’ libraries grow larger. Consequently, the management of system modules should allow adequate flexibility to satisfy users’ changing demands.
An additional lesson we learn from this study is about the range of services provided by social tagging systems. Despite that Douban focuses on enabling users to discover, collect, and tag books, movies, and music, it also involves other services for socializing purposes, such as publishing blogs and sharing photos. The latter services seem to add value to the system, but they are in fact weakening its image as a social library system. As seen in Figure 16, when track lengths increase, the distributions of capacity and achievement values become broader, however with most tracks aggregating at the low end. In other words, although the activities performed by users increase, their resource finding and collecting activities still stay at a low level. They may be mainly occupied in social activities during their visits to the system. Obviously, the importance of fundamental services and value-added services are reversed. Social tagging systems, hence, should restrict their expansion to social networking services to a moderate degree and devote to enhancing their findability as information seeking environments.