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A comment on Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well.

Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by mixmax on Monday March 23, 2009 @11:55AM (#528708)
"Also as always, the more faddish features such as tag clouds exhibit major usability problems. "

This is worth taking note of. Particularly if your users aren't very web-savvy.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by unalone on Monday March 23, 2009 @12:00PM (#528714)
Who decided a tag cloud was a good idea? Who used tag clouds enough to decide to put it on their web site? A tag cloud is one of those Internet Things where seeing it on a web site makes me lose some respect for the site maker.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by ken on Monday March 23, 2009 @02:32PM (#528969)
I think tag clouds are a fantastic idea. They just happen to be terrible for navigation. I don't know why anybody thinks that's their primary purpose.

If I go to a page, one glance at the tag cloud shows me what the author writes about most. I can't think of a smaller/simpler/quicker way.

The fact that they're clickable is basically irrelevant.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by unalone on Monday March 23, 2009 @02:36PM (#528980)
"I write about Macs and typography."

"I love David Foster Wallace and interface design."

You can say more in a sentence than you can in a cloud, and it's more personal that way, and it's not ugly.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by jmatt on Monday March 23, 2009 @05:56PM (#529274)
You can say more in a sentence than you can in a cloud

Yes, I agree. But the tag cloud will be more accurate. I can think of a number of blogs that have pretty ambiguous or off-target taglines.

and it's not ugly

Yeah there are some hideous tag clouds out there. Ugh.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by tjpick on Monday March 23, 2009 @03:36PM (#529071)
> I can't think of a smaller/simpler/quicker way.

ordered list.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by thaumaturgy on Monday March 23, 2009 @05:01PM (#529176)
You're right, but a tag cloud does offer a very obvious visual cue. There's nothing in an ordered list that suggests visually that the top item has the highest reference count.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by mhb on Monday March 23, 2009 @05:40PM (#529250)
What three variables is the tag cloud conveying by its tag sizes, and the tags' x and y locations?
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by thaumaturgy on Monday March 23, 2009 @06:36PM (#529323)
The x-y of the tags is pretty much irrelevant -- I don't know if anybody's actually trying to use that to convey anything.

The tag sizes are pretty unambiguous though, which is where the clouds do better than ordered lists. Ordered lists are inconsistent: sometimes they're ordered alphabetically, sometimes they're ordered by importance, sometimes by popularity, sometimes they're not ordered at all, which is visually identical to an ordered list.

A tag cloud on the other hand always relates the tag size to the number of items with that particular tag. That's the visual distinction that makes them more useful than a simple list.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by tjpick on Monday March 23, 2009 @08:30PM (#529466)
but a simpler way to add this information is to title the list. "Tags by popularity". You don't have to go to the trouble of inventing a whole other representation. I'd contend that adding a little bit of information to the title is much better than going to a tag cloud. The visual cue from the tag cloud (that the bigger things are more important) is inherent in the ordered list too (the things at the top are more important).

> sometimes they're not ordered at all, which is visually identical to an ordered list. An ordered list is always ordered, the only question is whether ascending or descending. And a tag cloud where the terms are randomly sized is visually identical to a tag cloud where the size means popularity...

I think the benefit of tag clouds is purely aesthetic. They just look prettier in certain places, and even that point is debatable.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by Hexstream on Monday March 23, 2009 @07:15PM (#529379)
You could have a list in decreasing order of importance/fontsize... I think it's harmful to use a seemingly 2D representation when the spatial relations are meaningless. 1D (a list) would be enough.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by Raphael on Monday March 23, 2009 @09:41PM (#529553)
But then you lose alphabetical order.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by ken on Monday March 23, 2009 @07:32PM (#529403)
Like any other text that word-wraps, x and y are not separate axes. The two axes it does display are "frequency" (size) and "lexical order" (position). An ordered list can only display one of these.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by noodle on Monday March 23, 2009 @12:14PM (#528732)
i feel like they have a reasonable use, especially for internal development, search and such. but trying to push them as a primary method for navigating your page is pretty stupid.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by unalone on Monday March 23, 2009 @12:17PM (#528735)
Listing tags might be useful. Weighting them by size makes the web page look precious. If I'm looking to find something, I will not think that sorted-by-use cloud sizes are useful.

It's also really, really ugly. Beauty in aesthetic comes from neatness and organization. Tag clouds are sloppy and formless.

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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by henning on Monday March 23, 2009 @12:02PM (#528720)
It's just one more pointless feature to ignore, like a row of "submit this page to some other random website" buttons, a column of video comments from some random video startup (Seesmic?), ads for Wordpress themes, and other typical Web 2.0 detritus.
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Re:Jakob Nielsen: Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well by unalone on Monday March 23, 2009 @12:18PM (#528740)
I'd like to think the problem stems from the fact that a lot of Web 2.0 startup startupers are extremely young and think that a Digg button, a bunch of startup plugins, and a column of AJAX goodies will add to a page's design rather than compromise it. Unfortunately, these things are so widespread that I fear some people have bought into these things as actual effective tools, which saddens me somewhat.
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