Reading Bokardo, Josh Porter’s excellent continuing discussion of interface design, we spotted a great referral to Luke Wroblewski’s History of Amazon’s Tab Navigation. Luke W’s post speaks for itself - especially the crosslink to a fully-metastasized 1999- era tab system. As Porter’s related post points out, it’s notable that Amazon has definitely allowed “popularity” to influence design, for better or worse. My colleague and co-poster Nick Gould points to Zeldman’s article as a great post on the topic of tag clounds and popularity as problematic drivers of interface design. And I’d agree with Nick, especially because Zeldman is thoughtful and though provoking. That said, it seemed to me there was something in Porter’s reply to Zeldman that deserved consideration.

There’s really no way to create a framework for solving something like the Amazon problem without taking into account “popularity.” And while this is hardly the unfettered democracy of tag clouds, it’s related. In addition, as bad as TCs and folksonomies can be…well, another point of view is fully with us and has been for a while. A stock exchange, by some definition, is a tag cloud. James Suroweicki’s Wisdom of Crowds is a well-researched polemic on this side of the argument. There’s substantial evidence that large groups of people are right about more things more of the time than individuals, no matter how sage. The Hollywood Stock Exchange is another, more pop cultural example. It routinely figures out months before a release how well a movie is going to fare- based on the collective assessments of thousands of movie-following people.

Now, in this context, popularity as a proxy for judgement makes some sense. The question of whether it makes sense when it comes to taxonomy of an interface is not so glibly handled. Nick points out that a major problem with tag clouds is that they’re lousy interfaces. How, he asked, can one find a recipe for chicken soup in a tag cloud - if there’s no obvious entry? So, when discussing the viability of an interface, vs. subjecting a topic to a self-organizing opinion system, popularity as a design ethos looks pretty dumb. A collective decision on whether something is good seems different than a collective decision about how to label and file information about that something.

But there is some small role for the latter. Maybe it comes down to mediation by an instititution or individual of what is popular. It’s pretty clear that user reviews or recent purchasing decsions on Amazon and iTunes are valuable tools in terms of both content and navigation - and that by beta testing things for so long, Google develops great products (not to mention the way its search engine works).

So, whither tag clouds? They are frustrating to a professional, no doubt. And overhyped. Over time, perhaps clouds might get better as more people participate, although that’s a question for generalized web culture - not the business of design. But the business of web design, it should be recognized, does have a place for “mediated popularity” - or collective wisdom, or whatever you want to call it - when it comes to interfaces. Even if, ironically, that place is to push design in the opposite direction of a tag cloud-like interface.

JF

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 11:41 am and is filed under E-commerce, Diary of a Business Blog, User Interface Design.