Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization

Tag clouds provide an aggregate of tag-usage statistics. They are typically sent as in-line HTML to browsers. However, display mechanisms suited for ordinary text are not ideal for tags, because font sizes may vary widely on a line. As well, the typical layout does not account for relationships that may be known between tags. This paper presents models and algorithms to improve the display of tag clouds that consist of in-line HTML, as well as algorithms that use nested tables to achieve a more general 2-dimensional layout in which tag relationships are considered. The first algorithms leverage prior work in typesetting and rectangle packing, whereas the second group of algorithms leverage prior work in Electronic Design Automation. Experiments show our algorithms can be efficiently implemented and perform well.Comment: To appear in proceedings of Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization (WWW 2007

A modular methodology for converting large, complex books into usable, accessible and standards-compliant ebooks

This report describes the methodology used for ebook creation for the Glasgow Digital Library (GDL), and provides detailed instructions on how the same methodology could be used elsewhere. The document includes a description and explanation of the processes for ebook creation followed by a tutorial

Design guidelines for web readability

Reading is fundamental to interactive-system use, but around 800 million of people might struggle with it due to literacy difficulties. Few websites are designed for high readability, as readability remains an underinvestigated facet of User Experience. Existing readability guidelines have multiple issues: they are too many or too generic, poorly worded, and often lack cognitive grounding. This paper developed a set of 61 readability guidelines in a series of workshops with design and dyslexia experts. A user study with dyslexic and average readers further narrowed the 61-guideline set down to a core set of 12 guidelines - an acceptably small set to keep in mind while designing. The core-set guidelines address reformatting - such as using larger fonts and narrower content columns, or avoiding underlining and italics - and may well aply to the interactive system other than websites. © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s)

The effect of contrasting selected graphical elements of a web page on information retrieval time

As online presence plays an increasingly important role in corporate success, the high usability of a company’s website becomes one of its most valuable assets. The time required to reach the needed information, which plays a key role among the many factors that influence a website’s usability, depends to a significant degree on the site’s design. The perception of the visual aspects of design is in turn influenced by various so-called “visual means”. This term encompasses a range of methods, procedures or techniques of using elements of graphical design to achieve the desired effect, which should be applied according not only to the informational content of the site, but also to the designer’s overall vision, i.e. the graphical layout of the site. Therefore, it can be said that a usable website design is largely dependent on the site’s composition, understood as maintaining the appropriate relations between its form and content. One of methods for increasing the visibility of a given graphical element is highlighting its distinctness, difference from other elements. This method is called contrasting. This article presents the methodology and a discussion of the results of original research into the impact of contrasting chosen text elements on the home page of a website on the time needed by a user to reach the information "privileged" by such a procedure

Studi Pengaruh Empat Faktor Tipografi terhadap Waktu Pencarian Kata pada Layar Komputer

This study aims to investigate the effect of font type, font size, line spacing and text background colour on visual search of “a predetermined word”. The study used a multifactorial experiment with four factors and 48 combinations. A number of 20 female undergraduate students participated in this study and their response time for each treatment combination was recorded. Anova test results showed that there were significant effect of font type (F=2.72, p=0.042) and font size (F=8.14, p=0.004) to the response time of subject. Further analysis using ANOM chart showed that verdana for font type and 12 pt for font size provide the fastest response time. Results of this study could be used by web designers for the production of web pages so that it will optimize interaction with the users

Studi Pengaruh Empat Faktor Tipografi terhadap Waktu Pencarian Kata pada Layar Komputer

This study aims to investigate the effect of font type, font size, line spacing and text background colour on visual search of “a predetermined word”. The study used a multifactorial experiment with four factors and 48 combinations. A number of 20 female undergraduate students participated in this study and their response time for each treatment combination was recorded. Anova test results showed that there were significant effect of font type (F=2.72, p=0.042) and font size (F=8.14, p=0.004) to the response time of subject. Further analysis using ANOM chart showed that verdana for font type and 12 pt for font size provide the fastest response time. Results of this study could be used by web designers for the production of web pages so that it will optimize interaction with the users

Developing a design system for an e-commerce website

This thesis consists of a theoretical framework on design systems including a benchmark analysis and a production project to develop a design system for an e-commerce website. The objective of the research is to explore whether a design system is a tool that is not only useful to be used by large teams but also for small teams. The research is based on the analysis of the positive and negative effects that a design system may have if employed by small teams vis-à-vis larger teams. The thesis is written from a UI/UX designer’s perspective and focuses on the following three aspects of design system: design studies, design practice, and design exploration. The design studies dive into the fundamental elements of design system, its history and the common practices of how it operates. In order to explore design practices, a benchmark analysis is conducted on two existing design systems developed by larger e-commerce companies. It demonstrates the process and results of larger teams that have integrated a design system into their product development process. For design exploration, the author worked on a production project to develop a design system for an e-commerce website that fits the requirements of a small team. Finally, this thesis provides a set of recommendations for designers on how to develop a design system tailored to be used in small teams. It highlights that while design systems are commonly being employed by large organizations, the development of design system management tools, enables smaller teams to employ design systems that are manageable in order to accelerate productivity

Learning to Read by Spelling: Towards Unsupervised Text Recognition

This work presents a method for visual text recognition without using any paired supervisory data. We formulate the text recognition task as one of aligning the conditional distribution of strings predicted from given text images, with lexically valid strings sampled from target corpora. This enables fully automated, and unsupervised learning from just line-level text-images, and unpaired text-string samples, obviating the need for large aligned datasets. We present detailed analysis for various aspects of the proposed method, namely - (1) impact of the length of training sequences on convergence, (2) relation between character frequencies and the order in which they are learnt, (3) generalisation ability of our recognition network to inputs of arbitrary lengths, and (4) impact of varying the text corpus on recognition accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate excellent text recognition accuracy on both synthetically generated text images, and scanned images of real printed books, using no labelled training examples