A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

But unless the building is oriented toward the outside, which surrounds it, as carefully and positively as toward its inside, the space around the building will be useless and blank—with the direct effect, in the long run, that the building will be socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it.

Look, for example, at this machine age slab of steel and glass. You cannot approach it anywhere except at its entrance—because the space around it is not made for people.

I couldn’t help but think of the “Skip Intro” splash page as the realization of a building’s edge on the web.

Sites that use tagging systems like Magnolia, Flickr, and Digg also provide insight into search behaviors, as each user defined tag illuminates the way in which users label content for retrieval. Simply search for a term you think people might use to find your site, then check out the tags that are associated with the items returned. It’s like peering inside your users’ heads!

1. Go to http://del.icio.us/url/
2. Enter a URL and click the “check url” button
3. Check out the “common tags” area in the right sidebar. I prefer to show a list of common tags to see how often a tag has been used, but cloud view will give you a sense of keyword weight, also.
4. Do this for your competitors’ sites, too

These keywords are useful for lots of things: copy writing, designing AdWords campaigns, and basic SEO insights about <meta> tags. Be sure not to place too much stock in these keywords, though, especially if you have a small sample of tags generated from del.icio.us. Keep in mind that those keywords are generated by del.icio.us users, who may constitute only a small segment of your site’s total audience. Their needs and motivations – and how they think about and tag your site – may be very different from other segments of your audience.

This method is simply a cheap, fast way to find out how some of your users think about your site.

A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry