archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Though you may not have noticed it at first (I didn’t – they’re located a few steps off the front page), the recently launched design of NYTimes.com includes tag clouds. After a quick review, I think their version is a good example of a cloud that offers some increased capabilities and contextual information that together fall in line with the likely directions of tag cloud evolution we’ve considered before.

Specifically, the New York Times tag cloud:

NYtimes.com Tag Cloud

The NYTimes.com tag cloud shows the most popular search terms used by readers within three time frames: the last 24 hours, the last 7 days, and the last 30 days. Choosing search terms as the makeup for a cloud is a bit curious – but it may be as close to socially generated metadata as seemed reasonable for a first exploration (one that doesn’t require a substantial change in the business or publishing model).

Given the way that clouds lend themselves to showing multiple dimensions of meaning, such as change over time, I think the Times tag cloud would be more valuable if it offered the option to see all three time frames at once. I put together a quick cut and paste of a concept screen that shows this sort of layout:

Screen Concept: 3 Clouds for Different Time Frames

In an example of the rapid morphing of memes and definitions to fit shifting usage contexts (as in Thomas Vanderwal’s observations on the shifting usage of folksonomy) the NYTimes.com kept the label tag cloud, while this is more properly a weighted list: the tags shown are in fact search terms, and not labels applied to a focus of some kind by taggers.

It’s plain from the limited presence and visibility of clouds within the overall site that the staff at NYTimes.com are still exploring the value of tag clouds for their specific needs (which I think is a mature approach), otherwise I imagine the new design concept and navigation model would utilize and emphasized tag clouds to a greater degree. So far, the Times uses tag clouds only in the new “Most Popular” section, and they are offered as an alternative to the default list style presentation of popular search terms. This position within the site structure places them a few steps in, and off the standard front page-to-an-article user flow that must be one of the core scenarios supported by the site’s information architecture.

NYTimes.com User Flow to Tag Cloud

Still, I do think it’s a clear sign of increasing awareness of the potential strength of tag clouds as a way of visualizing semantic information. The Times is an established entity (occasionally serving as the definition of ‘the establishment’), and so is less likely to endanger established relationships with customers by changing its core product across any of the many channels used for delivery.

Questions of risk aside, tag clouds (here I mean any visualization of semantic metadata) couLd be a very effective way to scan the headlines for a sense of what’s happening at the moment, and the shifting importance of topics in relation to on another. With a tag cloud highlighting “immigration”, “duke”, and “judas”, visitors can immediately begin to understand what is newsworthy – at least in the minds of NYTimes.com readers.

At first glance, lowering the amount of time spent reading the news could seem like a strong business disincentive for using tag clouds to streamline navigation and user flow. With more consideration, I think it points to a new potential application of tag clouds to enhance comprehension and findability by giving busy customers powerful tools to increase the speed and quality of their judgments about what to devote their attention to in order to acheive understanding greater depth. In the case of publications like the NYTimes.com, tag clouds may be well suited for conveying snapshots or summaries of complex and deep domains that change quickly (what’s the news?), and offering rapid navigation to specific areas or topics.

A new user experience that offers a variety of tag clouds in more places might allow different kinds of movement or flow through the larger environment, enabling new behaviors and supporting differing goals than the current information architecture and user experience.

Possible Screen Flow Incorporating Clouds

Stepping back from the specifics of the design, a broader question is “Why tag clouds now?” They’re certainly timely, but that’s not a business model. This is just speculation, but I recall job postings for an Information Architect position within the NYTimes.com group on that appeared on several recruiting websites a few months ago – maybe the new team members wanted or were directed to include tag clouds in this design? If any of those involved are allowed to share insights, I’d very much like to hear the thoughts of the IAs / designers / product managers or other team members responsible for including tag clouds in the new design and structure.

And in light of Mathew Patterson’s comments here about customer acceptance of multiple clouds in other settings and contexts (priceline europe), I’m curious about any usability testing or other user research that might have been done around the new design, and any the findings related to tag clouds.

Reading the online edition of the New York Times just before leaving work this afternoon, I came across an ironic mistake that shows the utility of a well developed semantic framework that models the terms and relationships in defingin different editorial contexts. In an article discussing the Matrix Online multiplayer game, text identifying the movie character the Oracle mistakenly linked to a business profile page on the company of the same name. In keeping with the movie’s sinister depictions of technology as a tool for creating deceptive mediated realities, by the time I’d driven home and made mojitos for my visiting in-laws, the mistake was corrected…
Ironic humor aside, it’s unlikely that NYTimes Digital editors intended to confuse a movie character with a giant software company. It’s possible that the NYTimes Digital publishing platform uses some form of semantic framework to oversee automated linking of terms that exist in one or more defined ontologies, in which case this mistake implies some form of mis-categorization at the article level,invokgin the wrong ontology. Or perhaps this is an example of an instance where a name in the real world exists simultaneously in two very different contexts, and there is no semantic rule to govern how the system handles reconciliation of conflicts or invocation of manual intervention in cases when life refuses to fit neatly into a set of ontologies. That’s a design failure in the governance components of the semantic framework itself.
It’s more likely that the publishing platform automatically searches for company names in articles due for publication, and then creates links to the corresponding profile information page without reference to a semantic framework that employs contextual models to discriminate between ambiguous or conflicting term usage. For a major content creator and distributor like the NY Times, that’s a strategic oversight.
In this screen capture, you can see the first version of the article text, with the link to the Oracle page clearly visible:
Mistake:

The new version, without the mistaken link, is visible in this screen capture:
New Version:

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David Brooks Op-Ed column The Art of Intelligence in today’s NY Times is strongly relevant to questions of user research method, design philosophy, and understanding user experiences.
Brooks opens by asserting that that US Intelligence community shifted away from qualitative / interperative research and analysis methods to quantitative research and analysis methods during the 60’s in an attempt to legitimize conclusions in the fashion of the physical sciences. From this beginning, Brooks’ conclusion is that the basic epistemological shift in thought about what sorts of information are relevant to understanding the needs and views of groups of people (nations, societies, political leadership circles) yielded interpretations of their views and plans which were either useless or incorrect, models which then lead decision makers to a series of dramatic policy errors – examples of which we still see to this day.

Brooks contrasts the “unimaginative” quantitative interpretations assembled by statistical specialists with the broad mix of sources and perspectives which cultural and social thinkers in the 50’s used to understand American and other societies in narrative, qualitative ways.
According to Brooks, narrative, novelistic ways of understanding provided much better – more insightful, imaginative, accureate, and useful – advice on how Americans and others understood the world, opening the way to insight into strategic trends and opportunities. I’ve read many of the books he uses as examples – they’re some of the classics on social / cultural / historical reading lists – of the qualitative tradition, and taken away vivid pictures of the times and places they describe that I use to this day when called on to provide perspective on those environments.
Perhaps it’s implied, but what Brooks doesn’t mention is the obvious point that both approaches – qualitative and quantitative – are necessary to crafting fully-dimensioned pictures of people. Moving explicitly to the context of user research, qualitative analysis can tell us what people want or need or think or feel, but numbers give specific answers regarding things like what they’re willing or able to spend, how much time they will invest in trying to find a piece of information, or how many interruptions they will tolerate before quitting a task in frustration.
When a designer must choose between interaction patterns, navigation labels, product imagery, or task flows, they need both types of understanding to make an informed decision.
Some excerpts from Brooks’ column:
“They relied on their knowledge of history, literature, philosophy and theology to recognize social patterns and grasp emerging trends.”
This sounds like a strong synthetic approach to user research.
“I’ll believe the system has been reformed when policy makers are presented with competing reports, signed by individual thinkers, and are no longer presented with anonymous, bureaucratically homogenized, bulleted points that pretend to be the product of scientific consensus.”
“But the problem is not bureaucratic. It’s epistemological. Individuals are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people around us.”
“When you try to analyze human affairs using a process that is systematic, codified and bureaucratic, as the CIA does, you anesthetize all of these tools. You don’t produce reason – you produce what Irving Kristol called the elephantiasis of reason.”

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