Category Archives: Popularity-based Organization

Make Clear How Your Rating System Works

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Users might be a little bit confuse or sceptical about the news or products you are offering if you don’t make clear how those items get to the top. If your site is using a rating system make it clear how this system works.

I read about NORG.com, a kind of local Digg, at TechCrunch and wanted to check out this site. I’ve found two usability flaws, the one that drove my attention first was that each story title has a number next to it but it is difficult to guess what that number is for if you don’t know what the site is about.

Norg Home 20071116

Second usability problem is that it’s not totally clear the way they rate news. How this happens? No information at the About page. Also, users looking at the Top Stories ranking could be a bit confused, logically the story with more votes is at the top, but it is not clear to me that the number next to the title is the number of votes. Maybe their interface could be improved.

Norg Rating 20071116

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

Tag Clouds as a Section on Your Website

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There is a difference in the way some websites use popularity clouds. If your site has a lot of content to be discovered by the users you may want to have a special section for a tag cloud.

Popularity clouds (or tag clouds) are a way to show your audience what’s hot in your site. As a concept it has been around for some time and there is nothing new here. The could is made by hot tags your users have been using, the bigger the tag is displayed, the hotter the topic.

A good example is Flickr, the photo sharing website. They have the “Popular Tags” section on the Explore menu. This shows that the tag cloud is not a secondary feature on Flickr and might be something very popular that users like to use to discover popular photos.

A whole section for the tags…

Flickr Tag Cloud Section 20071107

The Flickr tag cloud…

Flickr Tag Cloud 20071107

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

Popularity Based Organization of Music Charts: Last.fm

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Music charts are another example of popularity-based organization of information and one of the sites with more of that is Last.fm, the online community for music lovers. The concept is very simple, users listen to music on their iPods or online, and last.fm keeps track of the listened songs and artists. Then, they make charts with the most listened and compares users’ taste.

Lastfm Logo 20071106

The main charts are “Recently Listened Tracks”, “Top Artists This Week” and “Top Artists Overall”. Information is combined with artists’ pictures, the design in general is very cool:

Recently Listened 20071106

Although I love this site I have found two usability problems. One is that for some charts some of the information is like hidden, for example, in the chart below is difficult to see the arrows indicating if the artist moved up or down on the ranking.

Top Artists 20071106

The second problem, that you can see on the same picture, is that the charts are updated from time to time, once a week or so. In my opinion, most users would expect to see this information updated all the time, or at least to have the option of getting “The last 7 days” or “The last week”. Probably to get the maximum of the charts in your site you have to keep them updated, so the users will come more often.

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Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.