I was looking through our blog the other day looking for an old post which had something in I wanted. I thought I would speed up finding the post by using the tag cloud and it struck me what a poor interface control they really are. I think that it comes down to a number of issues:

• context
• volume
• order
• underlying issues with tagging in general

Context

I don’t remember the last time I saw context information for a tag cloud beyond the page it was associated with. Typically you might find them on a blog or a page of case studies so you can guess that maybe these are all possible tags but it’s rare to see any kind of time information as a label e.g. Tags for last month’s articles

Relevance

To support the context point above, I also don’t always want all tags, I want ones that will help me find what I’m looking for and show me trends. I may have written a lot about West Ham at the start of the year but be too embarassed to talk about them now but my shame will be revealed by a cloud showing tags for the whole year. Perhaps it would be better to show two breakdowns, the last month or three months (obviously depending on what you’re tagging) and everything.

Order

There doesn’t seem to be an emerging convention across sites what order show tags in. Some show in the order you first used the tag, some show in alphabetical order, some show most used first. I think alphabetical order is probably the least useful as different people will use a different tag for the same thing – you say macbeth, I say the scottish play. Then first used and most used well again I think this depends on when/why you are displaying the tags.

Tags

Yep – I do think some problems just come with tagging’s baggage. It’s so easy for you to end up with a number of tags which are really should be the same e.g. socialmedia, socialnetworking (social media eskimos can argue amongst themselves that these are really different). It’s easy to end up with huge numbers of tags even with a small number of things to tag. I recently looked at a competitors case studies and there was a full web page of them – horrible

So, clearly if I’m writing this post, we couldn’t leave out pages using tag clouds. We’ve now switched to summary tables in usage order (clearly labelled of course) with a full list of tags should you need them. I’d be interested in whether anyone has ever done any usability testing with tag clouds and what they found.