This week in ux-clinic: Lost in the tag cloud
March 20th, 2006
This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum- Lost in the tag cloud:
I do both design and usability for a midsize start-up (30 people) in the newsreader space.
We’re vulnerable (at least our VP is) to UI trends - as soon as our competitors do something, he’s running around telling everyone we have to do the same thing.
Last week, one of our competitors switched to a tag, and tag cloud UI for their website, and as the night follows day, our VP is now pushing us to redesign with a tag, and tag cloud model.
I have my own opinions, but I can’t find any ux research on tags and tag clouds - what problem do they solve? When should you use them and when are they a mistake? Should they really be the primary way to get around a website? I’m looking for both opinions and data to help me sort out my stance, but also to add some thinking to our trend-happy debates.
- Lost in the tag cloud
Reference: A screen shot and some examples can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
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This is more or less something to do with the way people organize information. One basically comes across 2 types of people - the ones who organize and the ones who search.
So, if the product is designed for customers who search and not those who organize, a severe change in the UI and design would be a deathblow.
I once came across literature on this in a paper about searching and information organization - “The Perfect Search Engine is not enough”
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/papers/chi2004-perfectse.pdf [pdf file]