Re: Usability of Tag Clouds

Try this:

Rivadeneira, A. W., Gruen, D. M., Muller, M. J., and Millen, D. R. 2007.
Getting our head in the clouds: toward evaluation studies of
tagclouds. In *Proceedings
of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems* (San Jose,
California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM Press, New York, NY,
995-998. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240775

ABSTRACT

Tagclouds are visual presentations of a set of words, typically a set of
"tags" selected by some rationale, in which attributes of the text such as
size, weight, or color are used to represent features, such as frequency, of
the associated terms. This note describes two studies to evaluate the
effectiveness of differently constructed tagclouds for the various tasks
they can be used to support, including searching, browsing, impression
formation and recognition. Based on these studies, we propose a paradigm for
evaluating tagclouds and ultimately guidelines for tagcloud construction.





On 5/24/07, Bryan Grubaugh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I have no practical experience with cloud tags in a professional
> setting, but have noticed several observations from seeing them in use
> across the web.
>
> 1)  They are a very trendy item.  I once saw them described as "the
> mullets of web 2.0.  Some people just can't resist mullets" (I believe
> Jeffrey Zeldman said this).  They serve no practical function that
> probably couldn't be better represented in another fashion.  This being
> said, I might fall victim to the "I don't know, what I don't know."
> problem, and I'm just waiting to learn something they are extremely
> useful for.
>
> 2)  They should not be used to show relevance, only relativity.  What I
> mean is, if you are going to use a tag cloud, it should only be used to
> show some thing's size, popularity, or importance against other items in
> the same set.  They should not be used to show results, as the nature of
> a tag cloud is to provide weight (often confused with importance)
> against other items.  When a person sees the tag cloud, their attention
> is immediately drawn to the larger items.  The smaller items, are often
> overlooked, as seems to be the OPs problem.
>
>
> Those are just my thoughts.  I've personally never been too thrilled
> with the trendy things that web 2.0 has come up with, so I might be
> slightly biased against them.
>
>
> -Bryan
>
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