On 5/23/07, William Hudson (ACM) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I was using a tag cloud the other day that had been created to display
> search results - the number of hits for each category determined tag
> size.
>
>
>
> I have to say that I found it very hard to ignore the large tags even
> when they were not relevant to me (the result I was looking for turned
> out to have a very small tag - but that's a posting for another day<g>).
> Has anyone else had this experience? Are there any studies on the
> usability of tag clouds or weighted lists? (A quick Google on "tag cloud
> usability" does not turn up much very useful.)
>

I think "tag cloud" is about as vague of a concept as "weblog".  In
light of this, at least as a developer, I would be in favor of asking
how I can mitigate this weakness of a tag cloud, versus whether or not
a tag cloud is inherently worthwhile based on a single negative
experience.

For instance, if you have some usage data on your visitors, you might
mix their browsing history with the existing content weight in order
to find content which is important overall, and important to them.
It's even conceivable that you could use the visible gamut to
represent this combined interest.

-- 
Justin Alan Ryan, Director, VonGogo Foundation
Independent Interactivity Architect, ACM SIGGRAPH
http://www.siggraph.org/members/jryan
+1-415-226-1199

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