Tag clouds can be used for a variety of purposes, like providing a high-level
understanding of a document. It is still unclear how users perceive the font
size of the words in tag clouds and how they make their judgments of the size
of words. In this poster, we look at how users estimate the relative sizes of
words given different characteristics. We studied the influence of
decorations like filled areas, boxes, and shadows to determine whether they
would influence the perceived size. Another parameter we tested was the
appearance of words (i.e. by choosing words with and without ascenders and
descenders). We found significant effects from all of those parameters, which
suggests that designers of tag clouds need to be aware of the influence of
design choices on the perceived data.