Dear Delicious: Please change your delete tags interface

A couple of mornings ago, I made the bold decision to going to clean up my Delicious bookmark tags. I’m not particularly good at creating my own taxonomy. As a result, I have a lot of stray and barely used tags floating around.

Imagine my horror, when I went to the delete tags page and found … a pull down menu! (Click to view a larger version of the image).

Yes, that’s right: Delicious uses a pull down menu for its delete tag page. It’s a bad UI choice for a few reasons:

• It hides critical content. You can’t easily see which tags you’d like to delete. You have to scroll through a tiny menu in order to find the tag you want to remove.
• Tags are sorted alphabetically, but not really. Most of your tags are sorted in alphabetical order, except if it’s a ‘for:username’ tag. Those are sorted by user name, rather than by ‘for:’. I was expecting to see my for:allboutgeorge tag grouped with the Fs, not the As.
• Pulldowns = Can only delete one tag at a time. No batch for you! If you want to remove more than one tag — because like me, you are the type to let your bad tags pile up — you have to do it one-by-one. Worse yet, you have to confirm each deletion. That’s entirely too much work.

A better approach

A better approach would be to use a series of checkboxes. This way the user can quickly scan and check which tags s/he wants to remove. Multiple tags can be removed at once, and the user can confirm the deletion in one batch rather than for every tag.

An even better approach

Better still? Use Ajax to provide a one-click tag deletion feature.

In this scenario, tags are displayed in rows of text. To remove, just click the tag. An expanded version could allow you to un-delete by clicking on the tag a second time. At the end, users could save their changes.

If memory serves me correctly, this is precisely how the tag management worked in the previous version of the site.

Even mo’ better still

I think the best approach, however, would be a simple drag-and-drop feature.

Users could mark a tag for deletion by dragging it to the trash. Undo a deletion by dragging it from the trash can to the tag pile. Here too, the user could all of her changes in one batch.

All of these alternatives are relatively easy to implement and provide the user with a faster, easier way to manage their own taxonomies. Delicious’ current tag management interface works just fine for deleting single tags. But if multiple tag removal is your goal — and I suspect that’s the case for most delicious users — the UI is far clunkier than it needs to be.

At the very least, Delicious should offer a batch option — a way to remove multiple tags in one go. Here’s hoping they hear me.