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Poll: Do you prefer to "flag" or "star" items for action later?

7 points by pclark ↗ HN
Had an interesting debate on if users "get" the concept of starring/flagging items for later.<p>In my new app you can "star" news articles and they appear in a separate "starred" view. She thinks it should be flag/flagged instead.<p>Thoughts? Does it matter? Do only GMail users get starring?

12 comments

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jacquesm
To me a 'flag' is a sign that something is wrong, a 'star' is a good thing (think 3 star restaurant, 5 star hotel).

A flag is 'attention required' but the subtext is 'somebody is going to get hurt (real bad)'.

mgrouchy
I think its to mean that flag means revisit this later, and star means "I like this". That being said, they both suck as ways to revisit things later.

I feel like we need something completely different. Generally when I star something, it means that its something I like and may want to look at again(like in google reader). Its not like I must action this later.

A better mechanism that that is neither flag nor star, but a mechanism that would allow things that were marked for action to rise to your attention after a certain amount of time if you haven't already acted upon it.

adambyrtek
When it comes to Google Reader I use "share" for things I like, would like to share with others and find again. I use "star" only for items that are not processed yet (eg. unread essays, unwatched videos) and I remove the star after processing.
walesmd
This is exactly how I use it as well. I share items I like and want others to see and star items for future action (Youtube videos I can't view at work, article I want to read, SmashingMagazine's excellent graphics/icons that I want to refer to later).
zackham
When I was implementing this feature in my app I decided against both of these approaches and instead piggybacked on less icon-friendly terminology that everyone understands: Remember this.

I felt that favoriting and starring implied that you liked an item, and flagging seemed to have a slightly negative connotation (think soccer). I wanted a term that didn't imply that you liked or disliked an item, just that you wanted to remember it for later.

halo
'Flag' on the web is usually used as a synonym to mean 'report to admin'. For example, Hacker News or MetaFilter both use a flag with this meaning.

'Star' is frequently used for bookmarks - Chrome, Firefox and IE all use a star icon to denote their bookmarks functionality. If you're using text rather than an icon, I think an explicit 'Save' or 'Favourites' text is preferable, however.

jvdh
There you go, you've wrongly interpreted the "flag" option on Hacker News: it does not report to the admin, it saves it for later reading.
mtoledo
like someone said, "flag" is associated with "report to admin" so its a bad idea as many users already have this association.

I, too, think that star is more of a 'I read this and liked it' than a 'I want to mark this to read later' like you imply. Its associated with 'favorite', not with 'pending'

I think in this case a 'pending' term is the best.

walesmd
It really depends on the "feel" of the application. For instance, Outlook and Twitter are productivity/communications applications to me. Therefore, I feel as if flagging is an action whereas starring is favoriting/liking an item.

Other sites, like digg, are just community dumping grounds in which moderation is necessary. There, flagging is a notification to an admin and starring would be more appropriate for a positive response (for action, favoriting, etc).

I guess, what I am trying to say is - if moderation is necessary, if there is the need for a negative connotation, then the flag feels that way. But, if there is no need for a negative connotation (like my email or Twitter, which don't require moderation) then a flag doesn't feel bad at all, it just feels important.

leviathant
I actually love the way Outlook 2007 does it - flags for time periods (i.e. priority) and color-coding for categorization. The previous colored-flags system in Outlook was alright, but this update really hit it on the nose for me.

I kind of use stars in Gmail, but I don't find them nearly as useful as the "For Follow Up" and "Categorized Mail" folders in Outlook.

Having said that, just about everything else Gmail does is better, IMHO

allenp
False dilemma? There is a gmail labs item that allows for "fancy stars" or something like that. I really like the yellow and red circles with the exclamation mark because they give an indication of severity.

Instead of using stars of flags - why not use something that represents "save for later" like a little floppy disk?

stijnm
What do you mean "starring/flagging items for later"? 1. To read an article later as you have no time now. 2. To save a read article for later reference.

I use google reader, so:

For 1. I just keep items unread (key 'm'). This means I keep all my 'unread' and 'read-for-later' items in the same list in the same view in the reader.

For 2. I do not flag/star anything for reference as I trust Google Reader's search options to find stuff in the feeds. Google will find things way more easily than any scheme I think of to keep stuff referenced.

For your question: Why use 'star' or 'flag' at all as they have inherent semantic meaning depending on the person.

Why not leverage that to its fullest and just say 'marked/unmarked' and leave it up to the user to define what it means.