Art UK Tagger

Tagger is a crowd-sourcing initiative in which users of Art UK are invited to tag artworks with descriptive words that help to make the works in the collection more searchable by subject matter, whilst algorithms ensure the accuracy of the tags.

As a result users of Art UK are able to search for themes and topics relevant to their interests.

Audiences will recall the old version of Tagger on the BBC 'Your Paintings' website which was retired before the launch of Art UK in 2016.

Tagger's purpose is to provide their audience with an incredibly satisfying and fun way of making a valuable contribution to improving Art UK whilst seeing some great art on the way, a similar concept to a CAPTCHA system.

Tagger aims to transform the searchability of artworks on Art UK, most of which still only have small numbers of tags, whilst many have none.

The previous tagger version launched 10 years ago saw over 10,000 tags added by the public, all competing to be top of the leaderboard.

Our role was to lead the design and oversee the production of the new Tagger interface. This included the complete user-experience and interface design, collaborating with Art UK's core senior team, and leading workshops.

We produced dynamic diagrams for users to see contributions, a leaderboard for (opted-in) users to participate and a simple, intuitive interface for adding tags, challenging existing tags and confirming pending tags.

The interface permeates the entire collection, where users can easily switch between browse mode and tag mode as they explore.

The interface allows users to pick from a list of tags, very previously added tags and also to search for tags, intelligent autofill suggestions are generated by Wikidata terms.

Users can keep track of their personal progress in their accounts and are incentivised to continue tagging works to score on the leaderboard.

In the past year Tagger has utilised the power of crowdsourcing to produce over 250,000 tags across 40,000 artworks.