Taglocity General Discussion Forum

One important part of Taglocity usability is where to place the tagcloud. From the first set of beta users I canvassed, here seems to be the emerging conventions (in order of popularity:

(1) Skinny TaskPane. A tall, thin, oblong that goes on the right. This is sort of a mock ‘task pane’ style look, and is the one seen in the demos.

(2) On Demand. Wide and short, normally put at the bottom, but on called up and opened when needed, i.e. you want to tag something, you hit the ‘TagCloud’ button (or hit ALT-0), and then close it with a 'X' when you’re done.

(3) Overlayed. For about 20 tags its ok to resize and move it so it covers the bottom of the ‘Folders’ area in Outlook. This seems to be ‘dead space’ and not to inconvient to overlay.

I am planning a lot of improvements in this area and would love some feedback. Big ideas so far are:

(a) A new and very small 'QuickTag' window - basically a single line entry text box which will take the minimum amount of space. As you type tagnames it provides ‘intellisense’ on which ones to hint you with. You can hit TAB to select one of the hints, which become more specific as you type more letters. The QuickTag window would also show you what tags are on the current item. You can leave the QuickTag window up all the time (it’s tiny) or use a hotkey to make it appear when you need it.

(b) TagCloud ‘dock’ left/right menu option. Something that will automatically reposition/resize Outlook and TagCloud so that if you like the ‘Skinny TaskPane’ style it will do this for you.

(c) Font defaults and sizes choices for the TagCloud. If you want ‘small’ to mean, 5 point Tahoma then you could do that. If you want ‘largest’ to mean 72 point Courier then you can do that too. You'd be mad, but you could do it. :-)

(d) Tag ‘ageing’. If you don’t use a tag for a while, then over time it ‘fades’, as in it’s color becomes less prominent. This doesn’t really help the space/size issue, but it helps you notice things more that you use more often.

I would really welcome any feedback/ideas on the above lists, as I’m just about to start work on the QuickTag dialog…

I do the tall thing too - about a couple of tags wide.

The QuickTag window sounds cool.

I like the tall and skinny task pane idea (assuming I can turn it off/on when needed).

I do the tagcloud blob on the right (about 3 tags wide, but who's counting :-)) so... the docking concept would help that along quite nicely.  It would make it all fit, vs the current manual approach.

I like the quicktag concept: I could see this becoming a primary UI as the tagcloud becomes a thunderhead. 

As a matter of fact, it would be quite useful on the tagcloud as well.  And/ or the tagbar.  or floating around as suggested.

Fading the aged tags seems like an extension of the tagsize issue.  I would presume that not using a tag would be somewhat related to its relative use.

It does seem like my tagcloud has a lot white space.  Some shrinking would be useful, as would a vertical scroll bar...

wow,

tall and thin on the right.

sorry i'd already emailed you about this before i found the forum ;-)

one point with the tagcloud:

there's five little buttons at the foot of this form.
  show colour toggle
  sort tagcloud toggle
  low opacity button
  solid opacity button
  'always on top' toggle

it seems like the 'low opacity' and 'solid opacity' buttons should be combined into one 'toggle'
maybe called "Semi-transparent TagCloud or solid TagCloud toggle"

Leon

This is where I pretend I thought of that upfront and say something like:

'Yes, the opacity toggle pair were just a placeholder for the new 'QuickTag' mode toggle - that's why we made two icons when one would do.'

But I won't. :-)

I'll combine them.

I don't use the transparency because it's too transparent.  How about changing the "to be implemented" single toggle with a little percentage "tool".  Just a textbox or a drop down with a slider control, or pick list with increments of 5%.

I haven't found a great spot for the TagCloud.  I generally keep it over on my second monitor, and it usually doesn't get in the way.  I personally loath app's that resize to make room for tool windows (e.g. MS Excel help).  I much prefer integrated task panes.

I also like the idea of some sort of drop-down/on-demand type Cloud, that makes it very easy to select an item in the outlook list, pop up the TagCloud, change the Tags, then close the TagCloud (need a big close/accept button, or just click away to hide it).  The key is that I've started to use the "Tags: ..." header to identify the message, and the TagCloud is really only needed when I'm ready to make a change.  It's an extra click, but saves the screen realestate.

To help the tall thin view, it might be good to have an option for only one item per line.

For a short and wide view, the tools on the bottom take up a lot of realestate.  I'd almost prefer to see them hidden away with a right click context menu, etc.

As the number of tags increases, I'm probably going to want to have some sort of grouping mechanism to organize them. 

I also agree with TimK's comment about the whitespace.

This evening I had the spontaneous urge to dock the TagCloud on one of the horizontal edges of my display -- i.e., the top or bottom.

I will now try the handcrafted "on demand" style mentioned as option #2 in the original post in this thread.

So I tried the wide, short variant near the bottom of my screen. At that width I currently have two lines of tags. An entire screen-wide line was devoted to the four little icons, and I thought it would be nice if they could be moved from the TagCloud bottom to its right side -- perhaps two by two. That would also put them handily right under the close-the-window X in the upper right hand corner of the window, instead of a screen-width away in the window's lower left corner.