The perils of Chinese tag clouds
Rex Wong, a Hong Kong UI guy, points out the problems of setting up a tag cloud in Chinese:
- Sorting: Do they sort by pinyin (preferred by Mainland Chinese) or by strokes (preferred by Hong Kong Chinese even though it’s hard to gauge how many strokes goes into a character)?
- Font sizing: Some Chinese fonts do not scale up well (see below).
- Mixed language: Where would English tags go in a pre-dominantly Chinese cloud?
Original post at UIGarden, via jaredRESEARCH.
Also of interest:
“uiGarden is a bilingual on-line magazine that provides an opportunity
for researchers and practitioners who work in the user interface design
(including user experience, information architecture, GUI,
and usability) field in the Chinese and the English speaking worlds to
publish their thinking and exchange views with each other. The goal of
uiGarden is to facilitate information exchange and communication
between the Chinese and western user experience design communities.”
Right now, there’s more generic UI articles than there are Chinese-specific ones; however, many of them come in English and Chinese.
Great article! I also liked his ideas about how to deal with the sorting problem: “Why do we have to sort the tags? You can superimpose different orders of sorting on a tag cloud, not just alphabetical or by number of strokes, but also by latest added or by latest modified. However, if you consider these orders meaningful, you are actually making an assumption that people would scan tags in a tag cloud from left to right, and from top to bottom, as they were reading a paragraph. Is this assumption valid? Or are tags in larger font size “popping-up” and being better able to get users’ attentions, rendering the order of sorting unnoticed at all? As long as tag cloud is not the sole navigation aid on the website, it does not have to be an exhaustive list of the tags. Perhaps the best way to use a tag cloud is to emphasis visualization instead of navigation.”
slightly unrelated but of interest:
F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html