what is the best UX for non-programmer users? comma-separated tags or space-separated tags?

Question

I'm creating a social site for teachers (non-programmers) on which teachers can add events, links, exercises, tips, lesson plans, books, etc.

Each of these items I want them to be able to add tags to as we do at StackOverflow.

However, because they are non-programming users, I thought that space-separated, nonspace tags and camelCase tags would lead to too much confusion, e.g.:

grammar teachingtips universityOfMinnesota phrasalverbs

and indeed on this similar stackoverflow question most of the answers suggested commas like this:

grammar, teaching tips, university of minnesota, phrasal verbs

but then I just signed up for a delicious.com account (which I don't think has a very programmer-centric audience) and saw that they use spaces as well:

separate tags with spaces: e.g. hotels bargains newyork (not new york)

What has been your experience on this point in terms of the current UX trend for tags? Is the average Internet user accostumed to space-separated tags by now? I have to admit, I have never seen comma-separated tags on any major site I have used. Have you come upon a good way to combine them so it doesn't even matter, e.g.:

grammar book reviews teaching tips

and e.g. have a quick algorithm which checks the number of current tags for:

grammar
grammar book
grammar book reviews
book 
book reviews
book reviews teaching
...

Answer 1

I'd go comma separated personally. You'll note that Stackoverflow doesn't but the tags are clearly delineated into their own boxes. Plus hyphens are often used for "spacing". I'd say spaces are more natural to non-programmers than hyphens are however.

Answer 2

It depends a little on how the tags are entered. If the user gets suggestions for tags as they type like SO provides (shades of intellisense), space separated is probably fine. However, if you are going to force the user to enter each tag without a reference list it may be easier to accept case-insensitive comma (or semicolon) delimited tags.

Answer 3

You don't want to check all those possibilities unless you are going to severely limit the number of possible tags - that's an O(n!) algorithm, and you most likely don't want to have that extra load on your server.
Your best bet is probably just to stick with one option - the users will (should!) get used to it fairly quickly. Spaces as separators are probably the most common, so I would go with that, since it is the one the users are most likely to have had prior exposure to.

Answer 4

Comma separated seems the most natural - it's what English uses to punctuate lists. It also allows you to have spaces in tags if you want. People will try to enter

this, that, the other

and expect it to work.

I can't think of a good reason to use spaces.

Answer 5

As long as what the software accepts/demands is clear, I think users will be happy with either. Confusion comes when they don't know whether to use commas, semicolons, spaces or...

If you use a number of e-mail clients you'll know how useful a simple tool-tip reminder of whether it's commas or spaces would be when entering multiple recipients.

Answer 6

I would go with comma separated tags, if only to save your users the pain of having to use quotes to indicate a tag has a space in it, ie website "stack overflow" tips, or website, stack overflow, tips. I know which I'd prefer.

Answer 7

When tagging, how you set it up depends on what kinds of things you will tag. Media that is hard to index, like pictures, audio, or video, should encourage many and varied tags, because the tags are how you will search the content.

Easily indexed content (text!) should use a very rigid tagging structure, because you don't need to rely on tags for search indexing. Instead, the purpose of tags is sort the content into well-defined categories. Tags should be more like labels or folders.

I'm gonna take a guess here that this content will be mostly text-based, with the occasional picture or video file thrown in. So you don't want either comma or space separated tag entry, but rather some mechanism that forces users to pick from an existing set of tags.

Answer 8

Notice that delicious has to give an example to demonstrate how to do it their way. That's not a good sign.

If you do go with commas, take care to see how easy it is for a "space user" to see that they made a mistake, and to fix it.

Answer 9

Comma-separated is the way to go for your educational audience. It's simply intuitive.

Most teachers should have no trouble understanding a system where tags are comma separated, and there is no need to come up with an awkward workaround for phrases.

Answer 10

I would assume space separated tags unless there are one or more commas, in which case you should split on commas instead. In other words, support both but in a limited way. You can probably guess right 90+ percent of the time.