Comparison of Alternative Methods of Tag Presentation

The purpose of this study was to investigate the unique characteristics of tag presentation on Chinese websites and their usability for Chinese users. A visual search experiment was conducted with 36 Mainland Chinese participants, who performed search tasks using six different tag presentation styles. Results indicated that, for the Mainland Chinese population, a tag layout with sorting is more effective than a randomly sorted one; but whether the tags are arranged in a vertical or horizontal list or a tag cloud does not affect their search performance. This study also found that the overall degree of satisfaction was not significantly different when the Chinese users interacted with a tag cloud or a tag list. The results of this research could provide insight for website designers when designing culturally and linguistically adapted human-computer interfaces for Mainland Chinese users.