There's an interesting post at Techcrunch about Google's inconsistent use of the terms "tags" and "labels" across their products. For those not familiar with these terms, tags and labels are used in blogs to create groups of topics. For example, this post is labeled "consistency" and can be viewed with other posts that use that label. Google's Gmail and Blogger (which hosts this blog) use the term "label" while Picasa and Google Video use the term "tags" for the same feature.

I see this sort of thing happening often, especially in large companies that have a lot of acquisitions. The acquired company has their own user experience style for terms, interactions, etc. that may or may not be the same as their new parent company. Most of the time, there is no ue designer to update the newly acquired products with the parent's design guidelines until several versions after the acquisition. Even if someone does point out this type of inconsistency, it can be a very big project to change one term in the user interface. All of the front end code (usually HTML), the back end code, and the help documentation have to be revised. Then everything has to go through internationalization and QA. Even if a term change is piggybacked on other product updates, you will often find this type of work at the bottom of the priority list.

I am often asked what should be done about high level ue inconsistencies across products. First, products must be consistent within. For example, Blogger uses the term "label" throughout their ui and help docs. Next, they should be consistent with the other products offered by the company. In this case, the use of terms is inconsistent across products. Last, terminology should be consistent with the industry standards. "Tags" is the term widely accepted term throughout the Web.

Were I making recommendations to Google, I would suggest they begin the process of switching all products to the term "tags." Though the terms "tags" and "labels" are nearly interchangeable and pose few usability issues for users AND a term change will create no revenue returns, Google must consider their appearance. As an Internet leader, Google should adhere to the industry standards and appear to offer a consistent suite of products and services. Sometimes, having pride in appearances leads us in the right direction.

Labels: consistency, tags