Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Nick Bradbury, creator of NewsGator's FeedDemon; it is one of a series of ongoing guest posts that will appear on this blog.  Enjoy!

One of the more challenging tasks developers face – regardless of whether they develop desktop applications, web applications or even widgets – is designing a feature in a way that not only hides the technical details, but also respects the end user by not asking them to do too much work.

When I consider adding a new feature, I look at other applications that offer something similar – not just to see what they did right, but also what they did wrong.  Most importantly, I see what work they require from their customers in order to use that feature, and then I figure out how to do that work for them.

That was my approach when I designed the tagging features for the next release of FeedDemon.  Techies such as myself like to think that tagging is mainstream thanks to sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, but the truth is, it’s still pretty geeky.  And even on popular tag-centric sites, it’s still more work than it needs to be.

For example, some sites do nothing more than provide a basic textbox for you to type a tag into – that’s it.  Other sites go the extra mile and enable you to select from a list of tags you’ve already used, but the list closes when you select a tag (a real pain when you want to apply multiple tags).  If you’re an experienced “tagger,” managing all your tags can be tricky at best.  And if you’re brand new to tagging and don’t even know what to use as a tag, you’re out of luck.

I tried to tackle those shortcomings in FeedDemon, most obviously in the dialog which enables tagging a post:

Beyond the basic textbox, there’s a list of tags you’ve already used that you can select from, and it’s easy to apply multiple tags because the list doesn’t disappear after you click in it.  And to help the tag-challenged among us, there’s also a list of suggested tags which is generated from both your existing tags and tags assigned by the publisher.

Managing tags was likewise designed to do the work for you – just select a tag, then rename or delete it entirely:

Renaming a tag goes a step further than normal renaming features by enabling you to rename one existing tag to another existing tag (basically moving all posts from one tag to another, a task that’s far too difficult in some tagging tools):

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that there’s nothing earth-shattering here.  But I hope it illustrates that when designing a feature, you need to think about the extra work you’d require of your customers if you didn’t design it correctly.  Chances are, your customers have enough work to do – so do them a favor, and don’t add to their workload.