How delicious is RM?

It’s been interesting to monitor how del.icio.us users tag the Rosenfeld Media site. As of this writing, the site’s home page has been tagged by approximately 80 users. The ten most common tags are:

• 31 books
• 28 usability
• 26 design
• 25 ux
• 12 user_experience
• 10 rosenfeld
• 9 css
• 8 web
• 8 webdesign
• 7 ui

If we focus on the various fields associated with RM, “usability” is the top term, followed closely by “design” and “UX”. This isn’t especially surprising given the lingering confusion of user experience with usability. (At RM, we see UX as an umbrella concept that encompasses many fields, including usability and design). It’s interesting to note that if we combine the synonomous “UX,” “user_experience,” and “user-experience,” they would easily be the top term.

“CSS” is a specific technical term, but it’s high on the list, as many developers have tagged the RM site as an example of CSS best practices (although a few of you haven’t been happy with our CSS implementation; improvements coming soon.) “Web” and “webdesign” may be ranked high for the same reason as “CSS”: users see the site as an example that pertains to their web design work. Or there may be something interesting going here: is UX showing up on web developers’ radars?

Other tags for fields that users associate with a UX publisher: “ui” (user interface), “webdev,” “ia” (information architecture), “interactiondesign,” “information-architecture,” “business,” and “hci” (human computer interaction).

Finally, it just missed making the top ten, but “inspiration” is #11. We hope we’ll be doing things to make that number go up!