> > Does anyone know of any resources regarding the drawbacks of tag clouds or > the debate about their value versus their drawbacks. I have a bee in my > bonnet about them and would like write a point of view but want to do > appropriate research first.
I can't talk about the actual data from the 40-participant usability study I was involved with about the usability and understandability of tag clouds, but I can tell you this: Almost no one understood the logic of the weighting of the tags. Many thought that certain links were larger because they were things the site designers wanted them to click. Some thought it was just "a design thing"—done purely to create visual appeal. While a few people came close, only one person accurately described how the tag cloud worked, and that was by reading to the moderator the instructive text, word for word, that explained it, and he did this only after being asked to—he ignored the text prior to this point. The instructive text appeared beneath the page title and above the tag cloud. In other cases, instructive text appeared beneath the tag cloud, at the bottom of the page, and went entirely unnoticed. Mostly, people just didn't care. It didn't help them, it sometimes confused them, and when looking for something specific, they strongly preferred the search function. In my experience, it's much more effective to use a straight, ranked list and avoid the cloud view. Giving slightly more visual weight to frequently-clicked links, as Yahoo's homepage sidebar offers, can be helpful, but I don't think it's necessary by any means. -r- ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
