

Ask HN: Alternative to the tag cloud? - helium

I'm building a website that will list a (hopefully) large amount user created items indicative on their relative importance.<p>I have considered using the ubiquitous tag cloud for this, but I find it a bit blasé. In my opinion, it's also not very approachable for non-techies.<p>What are the alternatives?
======
gjm11
What are the items? Are they best represented by single words or short
phrases? (If not, I don't see how you could use a tag cloud anyway.) What does
"importance" actually mean? What other characteristics of the items might the
users care about? Are there any that you can usefully use to arrange the items
in whatever sort of display you choose, putting "similar" or "related" ones
near to one another?

Some options:

Big list, starting with most important. Paginate the list if it's too big, or
something. Very, very old-school, but worth considering briefly. Will be less
unbearable if you can offer ways to filter the list; the same probably applies
to all the other options too.

Tag cloud (words with size proportional to importance). Can also manipulate
the ordering of tags in the cloud -- alphabetical is standard, but you may
have other ideas.

Image cloud (images with size proportional to importance). Can also manipulate
the arrangement of the images, draw lines between "related" items, etc.

Random selection of items (selecting few enough not to be intimidating, but
maybe give a way to show more), more important items selected with higher
probability, plus a button or something to make a new selection.

Find a way to categorize the items. Order categories by total importance in
each category. Allow the user to drill down into categories (which may be
nested, if appropriate).

Diagram showing a box or something for each item, no text or images or
anything so _all_ you see on looking at the diagram is the sizes; show
information about the box currently under the mouse pointer. Will work better
if you can arrange the items meaningfully, but probably won't work well
whatever you do.

Arrange in two dimensions by some characteristics other than importance. Show
items in some subset of this 2-dimensional space, choosing the subset by
importance and its size so as not to have too many overlapping items. Allow
zooming, panning and maybe adjusting of the permitted density. (Think of it as
a map with items for cities/towns/etc.)

Have a text box with autocompletion, with suggestions filtered by importance
and a fixed target number of suggestions.

Filtering mechanisms:

By importance. By name. By characteristics of the actual items (can't suggest
what since you've said nothing about what they are). By when the items were
added/changed. (You could have a slider thingy so users can watch how the
world has changed over time.) By similarity/relatedness to a particular item
or set of items that the user has selected already somehow.

~~~
helium
The items represent dynamically defined category hyperlinks. These will all be
all be top-level categories that are not nested. They will be enforced to be
short single words.

They might be loosely related to each other, although I'm not sure yet.

Importance rating will be dead simple, it will be based on page views in a
specific time frame.

~~~
helium
Reading the comments has made me think about this some more.

The most frequently used categories should be the real easy to find, more
obscure/rarely used might need filtering or searching and should actually be
difficult to find, thus discouraging their use and lowering their importance.
Hmm... actually it sounds like I'm describing HN.

~~~
access_denied
"The most frequently used categories" in appropriate time-frame, say, last two
weeks. Maybe give some random members to the mix so people discover new areas
and build up (depends on project of course). Do you remember Netscape's
"What's New?" and "What's Cool?" meme?

------
ieatpaste
Here's a discussion on metafilter:
<http://ask.metafilter.com/56228/Alternatives-to-a-tag-cloud>

You can find more experimental UI elements at infographics sites and various
visualization lab sites: <http://infosthetics.com/> <http://labs.digg.com/>
<http://sandbox.yahoo.com/Experiments> (it used to be much better before they
cut a bunch of projects) <http://www.etsy.com/buy.php>

I understand that you're probably looking for an established alternative;
however, most solutions need to be appropriate to the situation. Feel free to
email me and maybe I can help you brainstorm.

------
riklomas
I'd recommend this Edward Tufte book for visual data design, it's very good:

[http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-
Informatio...](http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-
Information-2nd/dp/0961392142/)

Also, FlowingData is a great site for data visualization:
<http://flowingdata.com/>

------
raquo
Instead of differentiating by font size you could differentiate by color
intensity (e. g. like in <http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/clouds/linear/>
)

------
Maro
Consider using hand-picked instead of generated aggregates.

For example, on a picture sharing site, showing me a mix of other users'
latest pics is just noise. But if an editor creates a album of "Old Mexicans
Smoking Cigars", that sounds interesting.

------
gjm11
Note: _anything_ with a lot of information visibly present in it is "not very
approachable for non-techies", so filtering is probably at least as important
a problem as presentation of the filtered data.

------
kurtosis
I prefer a ranked list, one tag per row. Also draw bar graph next to each item
to visually show the difference in magnitude between the ranks.

------
joshu
I've always kinda hated tag clouds.

Can you give us a sample of what the data looks like?

