Components
Tag
Use: Deployed
A tag draws attention to new or important content.
Examples
Usage
When to use a tag
- To draw attention to new, important content on a page that might otherwise be missed.
- To filter results with one or more tags.
- To indicate the number of new or unread items within a container. For example, to indicate the number of unread emails within a person’s inbox.
When to consider something else
- When users are likely to confuse a static tag with a button. For example, when the label appears in the same area of the page as buttons.
- To call attention to new or updated content, consider changing the background color of the object itself or experiment with changing the font weight.
- When users already expect content to be updated frequently. For example, on a site dedicated to breaking news. In this case placing the new content at the top may be enough.
How to use tags
- Users frequently confuse tags as buttons. Always conduct usability testing to make sure your particular implementation is not causing frustration.
- If your tags are not interactive, be sure to disable hover, focus, and active styles.
- Don’t mix interactive and static tags on your site. Once you establish a pattern for how tags behave, users will expect that behavior every time.
- Don’t overdo it — if everything on a page is called out as important, nothing is important.
Accessibility considerations
When tags are used to call out new content that is dynamically loaded onto a page, be sure to use ARIA live regions to alert screen readers of the change.