An empirical comparison of tag clouds and tables
Joshua Oosterman, Andy Cockburn · 2010
Tag clouds are visualisations of data where words (or tags) are positioned in a cloud and augmented with visual properties, such as font size and colour, to depict data attributes. Although tag clouds are common on web sites and blogs, their effectiveness as a visualisation technique has received little research attention. We conducted two experiments to provide empirical insights into the relative effectiveness of tag clouds compared with traditional tables. Tables were selected as the most basic visualisation performance baseline. The first experiment concerned the speed and accuracy with which participants could identify the presence or absence of a specified target in an unsorted tag cloud or table. The second experiment also analysed speed and accuracy with tag clouds and tables, but in tasks concerning identification of maximum and minimum attribute values. Tables were faster and more accurate in both tasks. We discuss implications for further work.