286 ways to delete a tag in Delicious

Delicious has finally redesigned it’s website with the re-branded, non-dotted name that we have all known over the last few years.

A good decision in my eyes as I always found it hard to remember where the dots went in the name and for long term growth and findability in these E-less, web 2.0 times it can only work positively for them in the future.

I can’t say I am over-whelmed by the redesign. It’s essentially a ‘lick of paint’ version of the older website with some enhanced search functionality, more convenient navigation (drop-down menus) and more efficient views of your tags in the tag sidebar.

One thing I find surprising is they still haven’t dealt with bulk deletion of tags in the redesign. Tags, the building blocks of the Delicious bookmarking functionality are still a pain to delete and manipulate. This is one reason in the past I have slowly pulled away from using Delicious as much as I used to in the past.

Current tag cloud as seen in the Delicious redesign

Here I have 143 tags in my current account. Some of these are duplicates or could be consolidated, some are typos that made it into the mix and some are just topics I am not interested in anymore and would like to delete.

My first thought was, “Sweet, now I can finally tidy up these tags and sort my account out”. Unfortunately this is not the case, you still have to delete or rename tags one by one. Then once you have deleted the old tag, you must confirm this step again. That makes a total of 286 clicks if I were to delete all my tags… not likely but a user may wish to do this on occasion?

I think this has bigger implications on how people actually use Delicious and hopefully they will add the functionality into upcoming revisions. I personally no longer chuck in tags as casually as I used to, as going back and editing them in the future becomes a nightmare.

I am forced to make sure my tags are correct the first time around, putting a pressure on me that I feel takes away from the spontaneous spirit of Delicious. “See something cool, tag it” and continue to browse the web as you were, knowing this item is bookmarked and waiting for you to read later on your own time.

This would be a great feature to add to Delicious, so here’s hoping for “phase 2″.

This post is tagged under: Design, Usability