Eye Tracking Study Compares Tag Cloud Layouts
From the massive quantity of information on the Internet arises the challenge of trying to organize it in a way that enables users to find what they need. What good is having all the answers to all the questions if you can’t locate the answer to the question you are actually asking? Media sharing, social bookmarking, and citation sites (i.e. Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, etc.) that are growing in popularity are using a new way to organize and categorize the information on their sites with “tag clouds.” These tag clouds are collections of keywords (also called tags) found within the user interface that categorize the content based on popularity or usage. Research conducted at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany used an eye tracking device to compare three different tag cloud layouts in an attempt to identify the most effective one.
Tag clouds can be organized in various ways, but their primary purpose is to facilitate visual browsing on the user interface. The font size, color, and boldness typically relate to the popularity of the tag. In many cases, the keywords in the tag cloud are hyperlinks to the content that contain the word and can therefore be used as a navigation tool. The study conducted in Germany sought to investigate which of three tag cloud layouts (sequential, circular, and clustered) were most useful for three different user tasks. Using a monitor-embedded eye-tracking system to record gaze data, the researchers tested the tag cloud usage of 36 subjects. The gaze fixations that occurred within the first 6 seconds of each test were recorded as they’re considered the main phase of the search process.
Although the findings showed that the optimal tag cloud layout was highly dependent on the users’ goals and the intentions of the site designer, the eye-tracking results offered some helpful hints for designing a tag cloud: 1) tags near the center of the cloud received more attention than those on the borders, and 2) that the bottom right corner was least looked at and the upper left was most commonly looked at in all three layouts. Tag clouds make it easy for users to get a general idea of the categories of content a site contains, as well as search for the content that is most popular.
Comparison of Tag Cloud Layouts: Task-Related Performance and Visual Exploration
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