This project is intended to discover the relative effects of different navigation cues in a tag cloud (technically, a weighted list).
Tag clouds are mostly used to enable people to find tagged items by clicking links applied to the tags. Those that are (typically but not exclusively) more popular are usually shown in a larger font size while those that are less popular are shown in smaller font size. The assumption is that people will be more likely to click on items in a larger font than a smaller one and, indeed, this has experimentally been shown to be true - in the absence of any other information, people are roughly 3-4 times more likely to click on a larger tag than a smaller one when they are shown together.
However, there are other ways to emphasise tags. The most common is list order but other techniques such as different fonts, different shades/density, different font styles (e.g. bold, italic), different foreground/background colours, different page positions, or graphical icons are also sometimes used.
The objective of this research is to discover the relative effects of these different cues when used in a tag cloud, both when comparing like with like (e.g. different colours) and like with unlike (e.g. colour vs text density or size vs colour). Because there is an indefinitely large number of possible combinations of emphases, you will need to narrow down the field to a manageable number, ideally by a systematic process of elimination that excludes cues that are likely of less value (e.g. by reference to existing research in the field or related disciplines).
You will need to design the research method and find the means to conduct the study or experiment in such a manner that the results are either experimentally and statistically valid, or that otherwise provide good grounds for asserting the validity of your results. This will probably require you to find the means to enlist the help of a large population of willing testers. Ideally these should be randomly selected but this may be difficult or impossible to achieve and a less random sample would be acceptable. It is likely that you will need to program a simple system (probably web-based) to display the different tag arrangements and to collect and organise results.
The overall purpose is to improve and add sophistication to tag clouds so that their users are better empowered to make informed decisions about which tags to select, by adding further layers of visually represented metadata. For example, different kinds of emphasis might be used to allow people to choose between simply popular and popular new tags (already a common design feature), or to select educational resources that match different purposes or employ different pedagogies, in addition to the usual popularity contest a tag cloud provides. If we do not know the relative effects on the likelihood of people selecting such things, we cannot design an effective system. However, there has been relatively little work done in this area so this research might have great value to the social computing community and perhaps in interaction design as a whole. |
