Tagcloud for website navigation
An excellent discussion emerged on rashmi’s blog about the website 83 degrees, and its use of a tagcloud for general navigation .
Overall the respondants feel its a bit too unreliable for serious usability, but has some potential to augment the more structured flow of a web site. The designer of the site reveals his reasons for implenenting it in the first place.
I am gererally not a fan of tag clouds at all because they quickly become too cluttered. In this case it was done as a design/marketing effort and not at all for UI. It turns out there are very few options for our corporate site, so it is relatively uncluttered and encourages discovery.
Found two more links from the respondants as well…
googlecloud - has apparently been released recently, quite disturbing.
and what promises to be an amazing post from joe speculating on how tag clouds may evolve. I haven’t even had time to read this yet, but if this is any indication I already looking forward to part two.
In part two, titled “Second Generation Clouds”, I’ll share some thoughts on likely ways that the second generation of tag clouds will evolve in structure and usage in the near future, based on how they support a chain of understanding that semantically links taggers and tag cloud consumers. Context is the key for tag cloud consumers, and we’ll see how it affects the likely evolution of the tag cloud as a visualization tool.