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So there's a tag and I'm struggling to imagine a situation where it'd actually be useful; there's much more specific and relevant tags like flat-design and responsive-design that have value, and already-kinda-nebulous tags like interaction-design and website-design, I can't think of a reason any question on this site could have only this tag and be meaningfully categorized, and that's usually a sign of a poor tag.

Kill?

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  • My vote is to kill it.
    – JohnGB Mod
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 16:30

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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The term 'design' is simply too broad of a term for it to be a tag.

Specific tags may make sense such as:

  • graphic-design
  • design-thinking
  • ui-design

But 'design' by itself just has no context so could really apply to most anything on this site.

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Kill.

The "design" tag seems to be more noise than signal. It doesn't get used very often (299 tags ever). And when it does get used, there's often a "[specifier]-design" tag used, too. After reviewing the list questions tagged "design", I can't see a meaningful pattern emerging. Contrast that with the questions tagged "user research", which is clearly a topical grouping.

According to SE, "A tag is a keyword or label that categorizes your question with other, similar questions." I don't see this with the "design" tag.

I think the "design" tag is not needed and should be deleted.

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    A "design" tag is about as relevant as a "programming" tag on SO. There is always a more accurate tag, which you see on SO when you search for "programming" as a tag. Same thing applies in this case.
    – Charles Wesley
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 16:04
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I agree that it is doubtful that any question would be general enough to require this tag, especially when things like and exist.

Still, what harm is it doing?

And isn't it a bit unintuitive to not have a tag for the top level of a legitimate category of questions? This is a bit different from killing a tag like user-experience, which would apply to everything on the site.

Forgive me if I'm ignorant of previous relevant discussions.

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    Re: "what harm is it doing?" it's making it possible to ask questions with no meaningful tag (or taking up one of only 5 tag slots), which makes the questions more difficult to find later, which makes it less likely that people will find existing questions before posting duplicates, which may cause a small bit of extra moderation work in closing these duplicates...which may be negligible. Still, I think we should blacklist the tag. On a site of people involved in information architecture, its a bit embarrassing to allow tags with essentially no meaning.
    – Graham Herrli
    Commented Oct 17, 2014 at 14:22
  • @3nafish, it is less than optimal specificity, but I don't agree it is meaningless. Not all questions are about design.
    – user31143
    Commented Oct 17, 2014 at 15:32
  • What's an example of a question that isn't in some way related to design?
    – Graham Herrli
    Commented Oct 17, 2014 at 16:49
  • @3nafish, lots of questions under categories such as testing, user-research, and terminology are not about design.
    – user31143
    Commented Oct 18, 2014 at 5:00
  • Yet they all relate directly to design. Why test? To validate or inform designs. Why do user research? To provide a foundation for designs. Why use common terminology? To move toward standards of design.
    – Graham Herrli
    Commented Oct 20, 2014 at 17:49

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