Archive for the 'Popularity-based Organization' Category

Make Clear How Your Rating System Works

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.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Tag Clouds as a Section on Your Website

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: 11% [?]

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