

Visual Exploration Based Comparative Analysis of Tag Cloud Layout
Abstract
Tag clouds have become a popular visualization and navigation interface on the Web. Despite their popularity, little is known about tag cloud perception and performance with respect to different user goals. This paper presents results from a comparative study of several tag cloud layouts. The results show differences in task performance, leading to the conclusion that interface designers should carefully select the appropriate tag cloud layout according to the expected user goals. Furthermore, the analysis of eye tracking data provides insights into the visual exploration strategies of tag cloud users.
Keywords
References
Ambrose, G., Harris, P.: Grids. Ava Acedemia, Lausanne (2008)
Bateman, S., Gutwin, C., Nacenta, M.: Seeing Things in the Clouds: The Effect of Visual Features on Tag Cloud Selections. In: Proc. of the 19th ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, pp. 193–202. ACM Press, New York (2008)
Clark, J.: Clustered Word Clouds (2008), http://www.neoformix.com/2008/ClusteredWord Clouds.html (retrieved on 2009-01-30)
Golder, S., Huberman, B.A.: Usage Patterns of Collaborative Tagging Systems. Journal of Information Science 32, 2, 198–208 (2006)
Halvey, M., Keane, M.T.: An Assessment of Tag Presentation Techniques. In: Proc. of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1313–1314. ACM Press, New York (2007)
Hassan-Montero, Y., Herrero-Solana, V.: Improving Tag-Clouds as Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces. In: Proc. of International Conference on Multidisciplinary Information Sciences and Technologies. INSTAC, Mérida (2006)
Hearst, M.A., Rosner, D.: Tag Clouds: Data Analysis Tool or Social Signaller? In: Proc. of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Press, New York (2008)
Kuo, B.Y.-L., Hentrich, T., Good, B.M., Wilkinson, M.D.: Tag Clouds for Summarizing Web Search Results. In: Proc. of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 1203–1204. ACM Press, New York (2007)
Rivadeneira, A.W., Gruen, D.M., Muller, M.J., Millen, D.R.: Getting our Head in the Clouds: Toward Evaluation Studies of Tagclouds. In: Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 995–998. ACM Press, New York (2007)
Sinclair, J., Cardew-Hall, M.: The Folksonomy Tag Cloud: When is it Useful? Journal of Information Science 34, 1, 15–29 (2008)
Viégas, F.B., Wattenberg, M.: Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization. Interactions 15, 1, 49–52 (2008)
Popular Tags on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ (retrieved on 2009-01-30)
ABC News – Tag Cloud – News topics organized to show what’s in today’s headlines, http://www.abc.net.au/news/tag/cloud.htm
Explore tags on Delicious, http://delicious.com/tag
Popular Tags on Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags
TagCrowd, http://www.tagcrowd.com
Tagline Generator, http://chir.ag/projects/tagline
Tag Cloud Generator, http://www.tagcloudgenerator.com
] Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds, http://www.wordle.net
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.