Using Tag Clouds to Explore Text Documents on Small Mobile Devices

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel interactive tag cloud to explore large text documents on small mobile devices. While tag clouds have been popular in the World Wide Web for many years, a systematic adaptation of their properties to the requirements of small devices has yet not been addressed. With our work, we apply tag clouds to access conference proceedings on a mobile device. In a user-centered design process we derived design guidelines and evaluated a working prototype. Our results reveal that mobile tag clouds work well with a maximum of 25 tags per cloud, that they can be segmented into sub tag clouds, and that users prefer the selection of multiple tags to refine the result list of articles.