Alternative to the tag cloud?
gjm11: What are the items? Are they best represented by single words or short phrases? (If not, I don't see how you could use a tag cloud anyway.) What does "importance" actually mean? What other characteristics of the items might the users care about? Are there any that you can usefully use to arrange the items in whatever sort of display you choose, putting "similar" or "related" ones near to one another?Some options:Big list, starting with most important. Paginate the list if it's too big, or something. Very, very old-school, but worth considering briefly. Will be less unbearable if you can offer ways to filter the list; the same probably applies to all the other options too.Tag cloud (words with size proportional to importance). Can also manipulate the ordering of tags in the cloud -- alphabetical is standard, but you may have other ideas.Image cloud (images with size proportional to importance). Can also manipulate the arrangement of the images, draw lines between "related" items, etc.Random selection of items (selecting few enough not to be intimidating, but maybe give a way to show more), more important items selected with higher probability, plus a button or something to make a new selection.Find a way to categorize the items. Order categories by total importance in each category. Allow the user to drill down into categories (which may be nested, if appropriate).Diagram showing a box or something for each item, no text or images or anything so all you see on looking at the diagram is the sizes; show information about the box currently under the mouse pointer. Will work better if you can arrange the items meaningfully, but probably won't work well whatever you do.Arrange in two dimensions by some characteristics other than importance. Show items in some subset of this 2-dimensional space, choosing the subset by importance and its size so as not to have too many overlapping items. Allow zooming, panning and maybe adjusting of the permitted density. (Think of it as a map with items for cities/towns/etc.)Have a text box with autocompletion, with suggestions filtered by importance and a fixed target number of suggestions.Filtering mechanisms:By importance. By name. By characteristics of the actual items (can't suggest what since you've said nothing about what they are). By when the items were added/changed. (You could have a slider thingy so users can watch how the world has changed over time.) By similarity/relatedness to a particular item or set of items that the user has selected already somehow.