In my previous post about tag clouds I briefly mentioned alternative sorting principles. Martien Heijmink’s weblog VIBE pointed me towards Wordle, “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text “.
My delicious bookmarks resulted in this image (I haven’t tried to optimize it, although Wordle gives a lot of choices):
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Not for navigation
This is clearly not a navigation aid. If you’d give your users the task of finding a particular word, they would in most cases score much lower than in the alphabetically sorted ‘clouds’. Nevertheless, it would certainly be a good idea to make the words clickable if this cloud were to be put on a website.
Chaos is good
In this case, visual chaos is good. The only structure in the data is in the relative frequency of the words. A artificially sorted presentation would give the impression of more structure than there really is. Most of the time, reality is interesting enough and does not need alteration.
Vertical text
Some of the words are placed vertically, the rest horizontally. Horizontal reading feels most natural. Vertical reading (e.g. reading the titles of books on a shelf) takes a little more effort. For mixed horizontal reading there is no clear, natural reading order. People don’t start at the top left corner, and people don’t start at the center; they just start reading ‘somewhere’, then read ‘something else’ in no particular order (unless you start taking other features into account). And this is exactly the behavior a word cloud needs.
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