[stcusesig_l] Tag clouds (was stcusesig_l Digest, Vol 4, Issue 5)

[Adrian Howard]

On 13 Aug 2008, at 05:49, Whitney Quesenbery wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 4:29 PM, sandeep Rathod
> <sandeeprathod at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Tag cloud is pretty much self explanatory for any users looking at  
>> the
>> interface; to convey the importance and the weighting of various  
>> subjects
>> they can be explored, with a easy glance with context to the online
>> applications/products basic need which directly help user to  
>> quickly analyze
>> before performing the action.
>
> I have done only a small amount of testing of tag clouds, but I can
> say that they are far from self-explanatory, at least for the people
> we tested with.
>
> You need to make sure that what is being shown in the weighting in the
> cloud makes sense - we had people saying that they understood it meant
> important, but that they did not understand what made larger items
> more important.

That's been my experience too. Outside of folk who are fairly  
experienced web users folk I've tested / seen using tag clouds havn't  
found them an obvious device.

> Some knew what it was, but actively disliked it as an interface.

The only times I've encountered this was where a tag cloud was used  
inappropriately (IMHO anyway :-) e.g. as the primary navigation for a  
wiki.

> Some just laughed it off as a bit of fluff ("trying to look artsy" and
> statements like that).
>
> A few seemed to really not understand it, and thought it was just cute
> typography.

Yes. Lots of folk saw it as "decoration" rather than navigation (this  
was when they were styled in exactly the same way as other links on  
the site).

> So, it's not just the tag cloud as a concept that you need to explore
> - you have to make sure that it (or whatever visualization you come up
> with) makes sense in your application's context..

Indeed. Of course this will likely change over the years as tag clouds  
becomes a more common UI component - but seems to confuse a lot of  
folk at the moment in my experience.

Cheers,

Adrian