Well that took forever. This turned out to be a very small sample, and of a highly informed and biased group. Furthermore, because of some new policies at SFU, the survey tool SurveyMonkey no longer complies with the universities regulations regarding the Patriot Act, and these results can NOT be included in our final thesis. Darn! Nevertheless, it was good practice for myself in survey design, and analysis, as well as building up a small network of future particpants within the information architechture community. Hopefully this may be helpful for future survey designers out there. OR it could jsut sckew those results all to heck as well.
It seems there were other attempts at user analysis performed at the IA summit this year. Check out Gene Smiths photos of peoples elaborate name tags. great stuff!
And now with out further ado, the much anticipated results of our tagging study. As gene explains, sort of a cultural probe. (ouch… did that hurt?)
The survey has garnered 23 respondents over all, most of them likely as a result of the email invitation that was sent out. As expected, our target demographic was in their mid thirties, using most of the common forms of digital communication available today,(predominantly email (100%), mobile phones (92%), and instant messengers (88%) 90% of the respondents considered themselves able to type, and 57% preferred the apple operating system.
Although only one respondent had not used the tagging functionality of any website, most of them did not find tagclouds very useful or informative, as shown by some quotes such as “not really, it gives me a high level view of the main things I seem to be paying attention to, but mostly it is a pretty picture” and “no, it’s awful. fairly useless except that they show you the top 3-4 tags.” 5 respondents did indicate that the tagcloud was useful to some degree such as “yes, i like seeing which tags i use the most. but i am a librarian.” I did not expect the tagclouds to be that significant part of the tagging experience, and the responses support that. As tags are used in various ways, the tagcloud is only meant to serve as a zeitgeist or gestalt view of the collection of tags. It does not represent the collection so much as the taggers interventions in organizing the collection. Other positive comments regarding tagclouds were, “fun”, “pretty”, “neat”, “handy”, and “cool”. The remaining results will be more useful to me as ethnographic artifacts in my continued exploration of this topic.
How old are you?
Average age: mid thirties
Total Respondents: 24
(skipped this question):0
What country is the passport you carry from?
Predominantly: Canada, USA
Total Respondents: 24
(skipped this question): 0
Check any you have used in the past week.
Mobile Phone: 22
PDA: 5
MP3 player: 12
Email: 24
Instant Messages (Chat): 21
RSS Agreggator (Bloglines): 18
Newspaper: 18
Video Game: 8
Total Respondents:24
(skipped this question):0
Do you type?
yes: 22
no: 2
Total Respondents:24
(skipped this question):0
What computer Operating System so you prefer?
Mac:12
Windows:8
Linux:1
Other:0
Do you use a grocery list?
yes:7
no:6
sometimes:10
Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1
Do you collect anything?
yes:14
no:7
not sure:2
Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1
When searching online do you use the advanced search features?
yes:11
no:2
sometimes:10
Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1
Do you use the tagging functionality of any websites?
yes:19
no:1
sometimes:3
what are you talking about?:0
Total Respondents:23
(skipped this question):1
Do you use the color labelling features provided by Mac OS?
yes:3
no:4
I used to:4
I plan to:1
Total Respondents:12
(skipped this question):12
How many words per minute (best guess is fine)
Average: around 60
Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3
How many fingers?
This question confused people
Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3
For what resources do you find tagging most useful?
Web URL’s (links):20
Photos:19
Music:3
Email:5
Other (please specify):5
Total Respondents:22
(skipped this question):2
Do you ever revise/update tags that you previously entered?
yes:7
no:5
sometimes:10
why would I?:0
Total Respondents:22
(skipped this question):2
*Describe your tagging ’strategy’ (one word if possible)
Open-Ended Response, remember,performative yet utilitarian, quick and dirty, minimal, personal, broad, easy, uncertain, archival, Pith, improvisational, look for and use tags - currently I am a tagee, not a tagger, semi-consistent, small sets, Eclectic, Flickr-style, quick & dirty. wait. that was 3 words. crap! stop typing!, remembery, carefree, clean, personal, recognizable, clear, findable,
Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3
For what purpose do you find tagging most useful?
Open-Ended Response
Organizing my material for myself and others.
re-finding as well as publishing
remembering what my photos were taken of
Finding things again for myself when using many different computers in many places.
for re-finding information at a later time, or for organizing artifacts in many different (simultaneous) groupings
refindability
finding my own stuff, sharing my collections of stuff with others, finding out what other people have in their similar collections
Another method of finding archival material.
I like to define content in my own terms, and to understand how other users conceptualize of content. I suppose in that respect it is helpful in searching someone else’s content - such as photos on Flickr.
marking people, places and things that recurr. For example, I might go camping with Mike. Then I go to the beach with Mike. I’m not going to group those photos as Mike — but with tagging, I can find them later.
identifying themes
Making personal collections so I can find things more easily again; creating my own organizational schemes; generating RSS so I can use content elsewhere, different ways of exploring the wide world’s collection of tagged content;
Later search
quickly categorizing stuff so I can find it later
Locating stuff later
In del.icio.us the tagging features lets me discover cool stuff saved by others
watching other people’s streams of consciousness. finding things that are interesting by watching interesting people.
organizing, connecting with like resources
To organize huge amounts of information in a way that’s meaningful to me.
Total Respondents:19
(skipped this question):5
Does the tagcloud assist you in understanding the organization of a system? If so please describe.
Open-Ended Response
Tagclouds are more like neat tricks than useful tools. It’s fun to see that common tags are bigger/bolder but that rarely provides significant information for me.
no
no, hate ‘em
yes, i like seeing which tags i use the most. but i am a librarian.
When using a system socially a tagcloud helps me to understand the bias of the system’s society.
only slightly
Yes, but probably not as much as I think.
No. Looks cool, but a frequency listing is more useful.
To some degree.
Not so much.
yes - my learning style is very visual so a quick tagcloud view tells me lots
Sometimes, I do not always give them a lot of attention (the cloud heights are very much relative.
No, it’s awful information design, and next to useless.
If it exists, it can help give a quick picture of the topics at hand. Not useful in much depth.
yes. seeing more ‘common’ tags is handy.
Not really. It just lets me see what all the other monkeys find interesting.
don’t use it
no, it’s awful. fairly useless except that they show you the top 3-4 tags.
not really, it gives me a high level view of the main things I seem to be paying attention to, but mostly it is a pretty picture
Total Respondents:19
(skipped this question):5
Would you be interested in being contacted for future involvement in our study?
yes:15
no thanks!:6
Total Respondents:21
(skipped this question):3
Comments? Questons? Feedback of any kind whatsoever?
Total Respondents:11
(skipped this question):13
Technorati Tags: tagging survey
For my final research project I am exploring the nature of collecting and archiving media, specifically cassette tapes. As their time has passed, I feel it timely to look back, gather up those dusty shoe boxes one last time, and see if there are any informational design goodies that can be had. 
The default view is a normal cloud, but as you rollover each tag, the associated tags appear around the tag in a sphere. the biggest issue with this (beyond the messy CSS) is tags with many associations start getting cramped for room, especially at the top and bottom of the sphere. I could set it up with a dynamic radius, so tags with more associations had larger radius, but that could get out of hand, and start drawing off screen, which I definitely want to avoid. 
Letters are a distinct type of form from an artists perspective. Quite often creative types will want to reduce the font size on a web page as much as possible treating it as a textural element. Other times it is exaggerated and distorted as the designer explores line, shape and the letterforms themselves. In tag clouds, the overall letterform, is not considered in the presentation of the data and there seems no reason that it should. If anything the font face and style would be the variables to tweak. 
Color has been used in insignifigant ways to date, for example with the third party service tagcloud’s blue and orange pallette. From initial observations, the different colors are simply meant to reinforce the changes in font-size or scale. No additional information is provided by the use of color, yet in a compostion it can be one of the more evocative elements.
In the case of tagclouds, Value would probably have similar applications as color. adjusting the lightness will emphasize or decrease contrast, thereby positioning the element on hieararchy of visual attention..
The tagcloud itself becomes a pattern that has much more distinguishability than a list or paragraph. Important words stand out because of the emphasis of scale and/or color. Through overlapping and variation of Value, the texture can become more abstract. This will allow more information to be displayed, but has negative effects on legibility.
Tagclouds can only occupy a certain amount of the overall screen real estate. We must consider the placement of the tagcloud in the UI, the context of how they are displayed and if they are on their own page. Special tag groupings are often displayed seperately highlighing their importance to users. The temporal aspect of a tag cloud is one of the aspects that gives it usefulness. It represents the state of the resource collection "right now".