I spent some time tonight reorganizing my RSS feeds in Google Reader. I have a category of blogs that I’ve organized under the label “UCD”, but as my interests have shifted toward user experience, I now find that the “UX” label is more appropriate for the list of blogs I read most often.
Being the logical person that I am (shut up), I figured that the best place to change the folder name was to go to Settings > Folders and Tags, but when I went there, this is what I saw:
Huh. There’s no way for me to rename the folder/tag from here. OK, I thought, maybe I’ll find it under Preferences…
Frustrated, I turned to Google (irony!) for help. It turns out that I can’t actually rename a tag or label in Google Reader, instead I have to create the new tag, assign the new tag to each subscription, and then remove the old tag.
One of the first lessons I learned as a budding UX professional is you always provide the user with a simple escape route. Just because a person has assigned a label to a group of feeds, it doesn’t mean that user won’t ever have the need or desire to change that label at some later date. As a designer, your job is to provide a clear path to that interaction, one that doesn’t involve kludgy workarounds or near-fixes.