I'm building a website that will list a (hopefully) large amount user created items indicative on their relative importance.<p>I have considered using the ubiquitous tag cloud for this, but I find it a bit blasé. In my opinion, it's also not very approachable for non-techies.<p>What are the alternatives?
What are the items? Are they best represented by single words or short phrases? (If not, I don't see how you could use a tag cloud anyway.) What does "importance" actually mean? What other characteristics of the items might the users care about? Are there any that you can usefully use to arrange the items in whatever sort of display you choose, putting "similar" or "related" ones near to one another?<p>Some options:<p>Big list, starting with most important. Paginate the list if it's too big, or something. Very, very old-school, but worth considering briefly. Will be less unbearable if you can offer ways to filter the list; the same probably applies to all the other options too.<p>Tag cloud (words with size proportional to importance). Can also manipulate the ordering of tags in the cloud -- alphabetical is standard, but you may have other ideas.<p>Image cloud (images with size proportional to importance). Can also manipulate the arrangement of the images, draw lines between "related" items, etc.<p>Random selection of items (selecting few enough not to be intimidating, but maybe give a way to show more), more important items selected with higher probability, plus a button or something to make a new selection.<p>Find a way to categorize the items. Order categories by total importance in each category. Allow the user to drill down into categories (which may be nested, if appropriate).<p>Diagram showing a box or something for each item, no text or images or anything so <i>all</i> you see on looking at the diagram is the sizes; show information about the box currently under the mouse pointer. Will work better if you can arrange the items meaningfully, but probably won't work well whatever you do.<p>Arrange in two dimensions by some characteristics other than importance. Show items in some subset of this 2-dimensional space, choosing the subset by importance and its size so as not to have too many overlapping items. Allow zooming, panning and maybe adjusting of the permitted density. (Think of it as a map with items for cities/towns/etc.)<p>Have a text box with autocompletion, with suggestions filtered by importance and a fixed target number of suggestions.<p>Filtering mechanisms:<p>By importance. By name. By characteristics of the actual items (can't suggest what since you've said nothing about what they are). By when the items were added/changed. (You could have a slider thingy so users can watch how the world has changed over time.) By similarity/relatedness to a particular item or set of items that the user has selected already somehow.
Here's a discussion on metafilter:
<a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/56228/Alternatives-to-a-tag-cloud" rel="nofollow">http://ask.metafilter.com/56228/Alternatives-to-a-tag-cloud</a><p>You can find more experimental UI elements at infographics sites and various visualization lab sites:
<a href="http://infosthetics.com/" rel="nofollow">http://infosthetics.com/</a>
<a href="http://labs.digg.com/" rel="nofollow">http://labs.digg.com/</a>
<a href="http://sandbox.yahoo.com/Experiments" rel="nofollow">http://sandbox.yahoo.com/Experiments</a> (it used to be much better before they cut a bunch of projects)
<a href="http://www.etsy.com/buy.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.etsy.com/buy.php</a><p>I understand that you're probably looking for an established alternative; however, most solutions need to be appropriate to the situation. Feel free to email me and maybe I can help you brainstorm.
I'd recommend this Edward Tufte book for visual data design, it's very good:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Information-2nd/dp/0961392142/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informatio...</a><p>Also, FlowingData is a great site for data visualization: <a href="http://flowingdata.com/" rel="nofollow">http://flowingdata.com/</a>
Instead of differentiating by font size you could differentiate by color intensity (e. g. like in <a href="http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/clouds/linear/" rel="nofollow">http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/clouds/linear/</a> )
Consider using hand-picked instead of generated aggregates.<p>For example, on a picture sharing site, showing me a mix of other users' latest pics is just noise. But if an editor creates a album of "Old Mexicans Smoking Cigars", that sounds interesting.
Note: <i>anything</i> with a lot of information visibly present in it is "not very approachable for non-techies", so filtering is probably at least as important a problem as presentation of the filtered data.