Focus Clouds, the easy way to help users discover new content
Tag clouds are massive these days... They're showing up on every web 2.0 startup under the sun and even a few old-school sites. Tag clouds are one of the most widely adopted methods of displaying a list of categories or other content filters. This is great as they're both accessible and a great enhancement to usability.
However, it's my believe that Tag Clouds suffer a fundamental flaw. By blowing up the most common tags, they provide a great way to represent a sites content that's already in favour, but in effect demote the less popular content. Simply because a category is not very commonly written about doesn't mean it should be less desirable than bloated categories. It is entirely possible that it's simply a new category and therefore has not become very well populated with content or that it's more of a niche term that can't hold as much data as a broader term.
This is where the concept of a focus cloud comes in. An example of what I consider a focus cloud is the STB Homepage. If you check it out, you'll notice the random list of search terms. At first it appears like a generic tag cloud, however what I've done here is left the emphasis of specific search terms to the Gods (or rather PHP's rand function). There are two beautiful side effects of this:
- Because random subjects are emphasised, we're not simply directing the users focus to the already popular content, we're showing him new content everytime he comes to the site.
- The code's a heck of alot more simplistic than a traditional tag cloud, which means we can have a nice mug of coffee in our spare time :D
I'm not saying that Focus Clouds are always going to be a better solution than a tag cloud, but when you need to display a lot of terms and want to encourage your users to discover new content, it's definitely an approach worth considering.