Wordle as a Design Research Communication Tool

I recently interviewed someone that used Wordle for the cover of their portfolio. Intrigued, I thought I would check it out for myself. (Excuse me if I’m behind the times on this one.)

From Wordle’s website…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

When I look at this from a user experience/ information architect point of view, I automatically think of tag clouds. Ya know, the hodge-podge list of tags typically found on sites such as blogs, representing the prominence of various tags that someone has associated with the site’s content.

But, I also think about a whole variety of other requirements gathering sessions, usability tests, card sorting and visual/emotional design tests that I’ve done it the past. Why? Well, because I’m always looking for new and better ways to illustrate the findings from these type of activities; specifically, findings from these activities that require a sense of prioritization and weighting. A feature of Wordle allows you to simply input a list of words, say from a resume, a bio (like mine below) or perhaps even notes from a design research activity like the ones I mentioned.

To provide an example, I took results from a emotional design test that I conducted for a client. Basically, the participants were provided a screen’s visual design for 5 seconds, then the design was taken away and they selected descriptor words from a worksheet that they felt best described what they had seen. Based on the frequency of occurrence of the words selected by the participants, here’s the result that Wordle generated for me…

My takeaway – a tool like Wordle could be used as a means to communicate results from various types of design research activities, especially ones that use more structured data capture methods (e.g. when participants all select from a predetermined list of descriptor words). In the past, I would have to tally up the occurrance of each word selected overall and then increase/decrease font sizes based on the word’s number of occurances during the activity. Now, I can just use Wordle to create the visual pattern for me. I will definitely try this tool in some future efforts and report back on its viability.

By the way, here’s my bio through the eyes of Wordle…