SkillClouds project presentation on students' search strategies with tag clouds, at Shock of the Old, Oxford, 2008

1. Get off of my cloud: preliminary investigation of tag cloud navigation strategies Carol Shergold John Davies Mirona Gheorghiu Tan Chui Chui Judith Good

2. A lot of students find ‘skills’ a bit baffling Photo by squacco at http://www.flickr.com/photos/squeakywheel/296747265/

3. Background - the SkillClouds project Skills is a turn-off. They [lecturers] don’t really mention how these are transferable skills you’re picking up ‘cos they are so technically focussed [..] They don’t really say, from this you’re getting communication skills or you’re getting team work skills because you’re doing a group project. They don’t really highlight that. You can say I can read a text and summarise it , but what does that mean for the wider world?

7. Evaluation of tag clouds Rivadeneira et al (2007) Font size associated with recall rates ‘ Gisting’ more accurate when tags as a list Rivadeneira, A.W. et al , ‘Getting our Head in the Clouds: Toward Evaluation Studies of Tag Clouds’, Proceedings of CHI 2007. Recall better for upper left quadrant baron coupe grist drawl hovel eerie lanky missy fetid liter prick heave golly

11. Results 116 students surveyed in March 2008

13. Does search strategy vary with tag size?

14. Does search strategy vary with tag size? Logistic regression undertaken. In the first trial, being presented with a small search target did significantly increase the chances of using the search box ( p=.038 ) In subsequent trials this effect was not present.

18. Search strategies Text entry box - analysis .. usually I’m not looking for ‘florists’, I’m looking for ‘florists near the station’, or something. So I’ll put it in the search [text entry box] because it’s more specific Tag cloud search - browse Because I was unsure, so it’s easer to be given a list of options and choose one of those, than think on your own and type it in

19. Motivation for choices Text entry box Cos it’s easier .. [you] just type it in, which is quicker than having to read everything Because it’s quicker. It’s faster, much faster, to type it and search because you’re used to google .. Tag cloud It’s quicker, I don’t have to do two things at the same time, I just have to do one thing Because it’s just easier

20. How the tag cloud is perceived A. As ‘noise’, screen junk All search engines have a lot of other things on it, and it takes time to look through it .. I glanced at them [the tags] and saw how many there were and thought No! I’ll just type it in! Maybe because it [the tag cloud] is like lots of random words, I didn’t look at [it]. Maybe if it was organised in another way .. I just thought these [tags] were examples of things to search

21. How the tag cloud is perceived B. As a potential affordance I think that’s just what you assume, when you open up a website and words are popping up - you just click on them First of all my instinct was to go to search it [with text box]. But then I saw that there was all the list there and I thought OK, well, I’ll find it At first, I didn’t notice it was in alphabetical order, because I think I just jumped to ‘florists’ because it’s massive. And then, when I had to look for ‘printers’ and it’s tiny, I suddenly realised they were in alphabetical order.

22. The importance of font size I’d prefer it if it’s not in different sizes. Well yes, the big ones did catch my eye, but it’s just confusing: Ignore the fact that that one’s big - I don’t need it - look for the small ones! It’s a bit distracting because things stick out and they’re not necessarily what you’re looking for. So ‘cinemas’ is smaller than ‘estate agents’ whereas you want to look at ‘cinemas’. And it implies that one is more important than the other, which it isn’t. I prefer the way it looks with some big and some small. If they were all the same size it would be boring.