cre8d design

The problem

I’ve been considering how to quickly and efficiently display a long list of 400+ links for a site in progress. I’m using the word “link” here but really they are well-defined tags that people can easily classify their content by using just one of these terms.

Some ideas

While the links could be organised into subcategories and categories, the categories themselves would often be a hinderance as different people would classify the links in different ways or young people may not know or have thought about the category for the link ever (e.g. if the links were about books, the word non-fiction is not well understood). Having users make a series of decisions about the categories before seeing the links could be confusing and time-consuming with multiple clicks.

The links could be put into a massive tag cloud, i.e. ordered alphabetically and sized relative to something (e.g. number of items tagged). When doing a test of this with 400+ links it became pretty hard to quickly scan through and find the link you’re looking for.

The links could be put into “clustered” tag clouds as described by Hassan-Monteroa and Herrero-Solanaa in their upcoming paper. This puts similar tags together on a line as a cluster and puts similar clusters together vertically. However, for this list of links, the clusters would be quite big (long lines) and subjective (similar to the first problem of classifying the links).

I’ve then thought about a tried-and-true method: just listing the links alphabetically, all 400+ of them. Scanning down the list of links is much easier than in a tag cloud but of course this takes up a lot more room and it’s a little endless. I then chose to split the links up into more scannable groups (A-G, H-M and N-Z) and arrange these groups into four nicely spaced columns with group headings. Bringing back in the tag cloud concept, I’ve made the links different sizes, depending on the number of items tagged with that tag to potentially add extra help while scanning down the list of links.

A new (?) technique

To further (hopefully) aid scanning of these links, I am using what I believe to be a new technique I’ve had in mind for some time (but for a different application). While color or color shade has been used as another reinforcer of the popularity of the tags (e.g. popular links are large and black, the less popular the tag, the smaller and lighter grey they become), I had a different idea in mind.

Colors or shades could be used to display personal preferences, rather than community-aggregated preferences. In other words, tags I’m interested in or like or use or look at frequently myself (any of these could be implemented) would be a different color or shade to ones I’m not interested in or dislike or never look at. At a glance, I could see how my preferences/useage compares with the community’s as a whole.

I’ll call this a personal+community tag cloud where color is personal and size is community related.

So, to conclude, I’m going to be displaying my list of 400+ links in four columns, sized by community preferences and colored by personal preference. It’s not quite a personal+community tag cloud but is based on this.

When this (large) site goes live with this implementation (sometime before Christmas I expect) I will let you know!

I’ve been thinking more about blog layouts and whether or not new layouts improve things for readers.

In terms of this blog, would this layout be a more useful and helpful way to organise my blog posts:

I’d categorise my posts into three broad categories (and use tagging for the specifics): blog design (the main focus of this blog), other (technology) interests (Web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, AJAX) and my life (travel, photography, music). I have friends who want to hear about how my life is going and while I could continue on with my old blog, it’s helpful to let people know when I’m away on holiday or what I’m up to here too. Content would be organised a little like newspaper columns – I have my favourite columnists which I turn to first before glancing through the rest of the paper. Some have suggested having different pages for this – although without a front page which entices you to read this extra content, it might be easily overlooked. I give emphasis to the main focus of the blog by giving it the widest column, older posts aren’t lost in the mix so quickly and my content is more focussed.

Of course, categories provide us with these pages already – so people who’re interested in just reading about my life could just go to that page. But what if we saw category archives as more than archives, but rather like main sections of a newspaper – something we want to turn over to see, rather than old stuff that there’s just too much of to catch up on? By linking at the bottom of each of these columns to the appropriate category archive, we invite the reader to see more articles and stories like the ones they’ve just been reading.

So, would this layout be more helpful to you? Of course, if you’re a feed-reader, the corresponding question would be, would you prefer there were four main feeds for this blog (all posts, blog design, other interests, life)? (Yes, I know Wordpress has created all of these already, but making them more obvious to everyone helps.)

While I’m thinking aloud, many times I’m at a blog and I wish I could quickly hide blog post categories which didn’t interest me. We spend so much time tagging things but do we use them as filters, rather than discovery tools? Would our blog/feed reading be more efficient if we filtered on tags which were relevant to us?