11. Bernard Kerr and Joshua Schachter, "Making del.cio.us Tastier"

PARC Forum: March 13, 2008, 5:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA

Making del.cio.us Tastier

Bernard Kerr and Joshua Schachter, Yahoo! Inc

Del.icio.us has fundamentally changed the way people bookmark and discover the best things on the web. With its launch in 2003, it unleashed the concepts of social bookmarking and tagging on the web, which have inspired an entire generation of social sites.

Many millions of bookmarks later, del.icio.us is now preparing for the next stage of its journey: a new release that features a fresh design with many new features. This talk will explore the unique design challenges of evolving an iconic design into a much richer experience that attracts new users without alienating the existing ones. We will share many of the lessons learned along the way, and show how these have affected our thinking and the upcoming design.



Bernard Kerr
Design Lead del.icio.us
Yahoo! Inc

Bernard Kerr is the lead designer on del.icio.us. He is in charge of the complete user experience for del.icio.us and the ecosystem of products that surround it.

Prior to working at Yahoo! he was a Strategic Designer at IBM Research's Collaborative User Experience group, where his research focused on designing advanced concept software applications and visualizations for collaboration. His work has been published various places including the Infovis and CHI conferences. Before joining IBM Research Bernard held positions at Interval Research and IDEO.

Bernard graduated from the Royal College of Art’s Computer Related Design program in London (2000). He also holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand (1992).


Joshua Schachter
Founder of del.icio.us; director of engineering, Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc.

Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, put web tagging and social bookmarking front and center at Yahoo! when his company was acquired in December 2005. Joshua is responsible for overseeing the strategic direction and growth of the del.icio.us platform and user community as part of Yahoo!’s ongoing development of social search tools.

Before founding del.icio.us, Inc. in 2005 (it was originally developed as a personal hobby starting in 2003), Joshua spent 10 years in the financial services industry in New York