9 ms·

Most users can't handle hierarchy.

crazygringo 8y ago
Please don't repeat this myth. It's simply not true. Every normal user can understand hierarchy -- shoeboxes in closets in rooms in houses in neighborhoods in cities. The human mind orders things in hierarchies effortlessly. It's just incorrect to claim otherwise. The only thing users sometimes can't understand are badly designed user interfaces for exposing and navigating a hierarchy.
- magduf 8y ago
  Humans might be able to understand hierarchy, and even apply it to physical objects in their possession sometimes, but looking at the filesystem of the average computer user would eliminate any notions you have that average users can actually maintain their own filesystems, or have any desire to.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    That's a sign that we need to fix file hierarchy then, not that users are wrong or stupid.
    - slig 8y ago
      They just don't care. Whatever they have now is fine for them. How are we going to fix that?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Just go and do it instead of performing bullshit A/B tests and copying whatever lowest-common-denominator solution your competitors invented. Regular users don't have context for technology, they scoop up whatever companies offer on the market. If everyone gravitates towards the same crappy solutions, most users won't complain, because they can't or don't want to imagine how things could be made better.
    - magduf 8y ago
      Users are wrong, and more importantly, lazy. No non-geek users actually want to spend their time organizing all their files into a well-thought-out hierarchical directory structure. Even worse, now users have been trained that it's simply not necessary, because "I can just search for whatever I'm looking for".
      - anisppp 8y ago
        The irony. Anybody with basic knowledge of CS (ie a geek user) should grok that there is no such thing as a “well-thought” hierarchy. This is the very reason relational databases exist. And for desktop and phone purposes, search is popular because it works damn well.
        magduf 8y ago
        >And for desktop and phone purposes, search is popular because it works damn well. It works well, until it doesn't. It's especially bad if you don't remember exactly what you're looking for; this is when a decent hierarchy is really useful. And yes, hierarchies have problems, which is why RDBMSs took over from the older hierarchical DBs which were used before that (such as on the Apollo program), but just throwing everything into a single directory and hoping file metadata and search will replace it all is wishful thinking.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > It works well, until it doesn't. In particular, search tend to be buggy, and if you have no reference hierarchy that you know shows you unfiltered results, you have no basis to trust that the results of your search query are accurate. This is no 1. reason I rarely ever use search on Android or Windows. I don't trust it.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    this reminds me of the time that I helped my dad migrate his data to a new imac. with somewhat low expectations, I asked him if he knew where all his important documents were on disk. to my surprise he said confidently "sure I do!". he then opened the "All My Files" link in finder. I guess in a certain sense he wasn't wrong, but I still had to spend hours disentangling the files he actually wanted from thousands of random temp files and downloads. I made him get an external drive to clone the old drive anyway, and every so often I would have to help him find something that we had missed in the first pass. I remember wondering at the time: do windows and mac not do enough to help users organize their files, or are the cute little My Documents and Pictures folders that obscure the underlying filesystem already too much?
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    A big part of that is the fact programs tend to spew their files haphazardly through Program Files/Program Data/Appdata/Documents/etc. I would be confused too with a physical hierarchical system if I had a robot that would randomly put the fruit in the closet shoeboxes next to a pile of batteries and toothpaste.
darkpuma 8y ago
Hierarchy can't handle most users. There is a fundamental impedance mismatch between what hierarchies facilitate and how users think of their files. Users think of their files as having concepts associated with them. e.g. "this file is a photo, about my vacation, and is about scuba" or "this file is a book, about scuba" The user may attempt to express the numerous concepts they associate with their files in terms of a hierarchy, but chances are good they will fail miserably because hierarchies simply aren't up for the task of organizing even moderately diverse data. Is 'vacation' a subset of 'photos', with 'scuba' being a subset of 'vacation'? Where then does their scuba book go? Is the 'scuba' sub-directory something they must create twice, once under 'vacation' and once under 'books'? Inevitably some concepts get duplicated sub-directories across the system, or the user settles on under-organization. This is because hierarchy isn't up to the task of organizing files in the way humans think about files. The answer of course is some form of file tagging, so that 'scuba' can be a single distinct group that overlaps with both 'books' and 'vacation' and 'photos', but isn't a strict subset of any of those.
- zrm 8y ago
  > The answer of course is some form of file tagging, so that 'scuba' can be a single distinct group that overlaps with both 'books' and 'vacation' and 'photos', but isn't a strict subset of any of those. But that is separate from what file paths are for, which is essentially a semantically meaningful unique identifier. If you want to take a photo with the camera app, crop it with the image editor app, then attach it to an email with the email app, you shouldn't have to search through your photos again the second two times to re-find the one you're already working on. There ought to be something equivalent to copying the file path to the clipboard so that you can reference the file you're already working with in another app.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > "But that is separate from what file paths are for" This is close to my core point. File paths and/or file hierarchies are not good for file organization. They have been pressed into this role for historic reasons and out of inertia. Papering over the problems of file hierarchies by implementing a good copy-paste system is not a good solution to the fundamental problem. It alleviates some problems, but not all. You can conceivably copy-paste a file you've been working on in one app into another, but what if you want to retrieve a file you last interacted with a year ago? How will you find that file? Under the file hierarchy scheme, in order to retrieve an old file the user must remember the idiosyncrasies of the hierarchy they created ages ago, with many concepts invariably being split into gods know how many subdirectories, OR nearly all of their files sitting in a small handful of directories, unorganized, with little more than the file name to help retrieve the desired file. These are both poor states of affairs. They require the user to store too much extraneous state about the system in their head in order to have any chance of efficiently finding the files they're looking for. Modern systems have begun to improve on this state of affairs by implementing file searching capabilities that function more like internet search engines than traditional hierarchical directory explorers. In theory the user may be able to simply search "scuba" and the black box file search system may use a variety of methods for pulling up a list of files from numerous different subdirectories it believes to be scuba related. Perhaps it pulls in both /vacations/2017/scuba/neat-fish.jpg and /books/scuba/how-to-scuba.epub because both have the string "scuba" in their path. Or perhaps there is some exotic shit going on behind the scenes and an image classifier was previously used to determine the presence of scuba gear in /Pictures/1002389943-984983-198395.jpg This sort of file search engine is fundamentally an imperfect file tagging system. The tagging in this case is being done automatically in a variety of ways the user may or may not be aware of and understand, and may or may not be able to consciously influence and exploit. Let's take a step back for a moment and define the problem: In the mind of the user, there exists a many-to-many mapping between files and concepts. When a user is thinking of a particular file, they have in mind a set of traits about that file. (For example, the user might be thinking of "that picture I took of a strange fish while scuba diving on vacation." The concepts associated with that file might be picture, fish, scuba, vacation.) How do we get that mapping out of the user's head and into the computer, such that it can be used by the computer to retrieve the files a user desires when thinking about a particular set of concepts? That's not yet a question with a definite answer. Automatic tagging of files with concepts the user is anticipated to have should certainly play a role. Image classification is heavy, and therefore has privacy implications since that sort of thing is virtually always offloaded to some corporate server, but when it works well it's great. There are easy sources for automatic tags as well, such as extracting terms out of the file path, or extracting date ranges or even geolocation out of the file metadata. These are great, but typically prove insufficient on their own. Asking the user to manually tag their files with the concepts they associate each file with gets you a very high quality many-to-many mapping between files and concepts, but that is manually intensive. Notoriously so. One solution is to amortize it; during file creation ask the user to tag the file instead of naming the file. That's okay, but still not great. The user might be snapping 10 photos a second and not care to take the time to tag or even name each individual file. How do we meet the needs of that sort of user? A solution I've been exploring is the creation of statistical models that assist the user in manual tagging, to blur the line between automatic and manual tagging. Here is what I mean by that: suppose the user imports 500 new jpg images, with metadata suggesting they were all taken in within a half hour of each other. The user tags ONE of those pictures with "vacation". What is the probability that the remaining pictures in that set are also vacation pictures? Pretty high. (Of course that's a trivial example, the user could just as well import the images all at once in a directory called 'vacation', but this goes back to my earlier point of extracting the many-to-many mapping that exists in the user's head. 'vacation' is merely one tag. By constructing the right statistical models, we can support an arbitrary number of tags.
m-p-3 8y ago
Having dealt with many technologically inept users in many departments including HR and Finance, I can confidently say that file hierarchy was NOT a concept they were struggling with compared to others.

Please don't repeat this myth. It's simply not true. Every normal user can understand hierarchy -- shoeboxes in closets in rooms in houses in neighborhoods in cities. The human mind orders things in hierarchies effortlessly. It's just incorrect to claim otherwise. The only thing users sometimes can't understand are badly designed user interfaces for exposing and navigating a hierarchy.

magduf 8y ago
Humans might be able to understand hierarchy, and even apply it to physical objects in their possession sometimes, but looking at the filesystem of the average computer user would eliminate any notions you have that average users can actually maintain their own filesystems, or have any desire to.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  That's a sign that we need to fix file hierarchy then, not that users are wrong or stupid.
  - slig 8y ago
    They just don't care. Whatever they have now is fine for them. How are we going to fix that?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Just go and do it instead of performing bullshit A/B tests and copying whatever lowest-common-denominator solution your competitors invented. Regular users don't have context for technology, they scoop up whatever companies offer on the market. If everyone gravitates towards the same crappy solutions, most users won't complain, because they can't or don't want to imagine how things could be made better.
  - magduf 8y ago
    Users are wrong, and more importantly, lazy. No non-geek users actually want to spend their time organizing all their files into a well-thought-out hierarchical directory structure. Even worse, now users have been trained that it's simply not necessary, because "I can just search for whatever I'm looking for".
    - anisppp 8y ago
      The irony. Anybody with basic knowledge of CS (ie a geek user) should grok that there is no such thing as a “well-thought” hierarchy. This is the very reason relational databases exist. And for desktop and phone purposes, search is popular because it works damn well.
      - magduf 8y ago
        >And for desktop and phone purposes, search is popular because it works damn well. It works well, until it doesn't. It's especially bad if you don't remember exactly what you're looking for; this is when a decent hierarchy is really useful. And yes, hierarchies have problems, which is why RDBMSs took over from the older hierarchical DBs which were used before that (such as on the Apollo program), but just throwing everything into a single directory and hoping file metadata and search will replace it all is wishful thinking.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > It works well, until it doesn't. In particular, search tend to be buggy, and if you have no reference hierarchy that you know shows you unfiltered results, you have no basis to trust that the results of your search query are accurate. This is no 1. reason I rarely ever use search on Android or Windows. I don't trust it.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  this reminds me of the time that I helped my dad migrate his data to a new imac. with somewhat low expectations, I asked him if he knew where all his important documents were on disk. to my surprise he said confidently "sure I do!". he then opened the "All My Files" link in finder. I guess in a certain sense he wasn't wrong, but I still had to spend hours disentangling the files he actually wanted from thousands of random temp files and downloads. I made him get an external drive to clone the old drive anyway, and every so often I would have to help him find something that we had missed in the first pass. I remember wondering at the time: do windows and mac not do enough to help users organize their files, or are the cute little My Documents and Pictures folders that obscure the underlying filesystem already too much?
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  A big part of that is the fact programs tend to spew their files haphazardly through Program Files/Program Data/Appdata/Documents/etc. I would be confused too with a physical hierarchical system if I had a robot that would randomly put the fruit in the closet shoeboxes next to a pile of batteries and toothpaste.

darkpuma 8y ago

Hierarchy can't handle most users. There is a fundamental impedance mismatch between what hierarchies facilitate and how users think of their files. Users think of their files as having concepts associated with them. e.g. "this file is a photo, about my vacation, and is about scuba" or "this file is a book, about scuba" The user may attempt to express the numerous concepts they associate with their files in terms of a hierarchy, but chances are good they will fail miserably because hierarchies simply aren't up for the task of organizing even moderately diverse data. Is 'vacation' a subset of 'photos', with 'scuba' being a subset of 'vacation'? Where then does their scuba book go? Is the 'scuba' sub-directory something they must create twice, once under 'vacation' and once under 'books'? Inevitably some concepts get duplicated sub-directories across the system, or the user settles on under-organization. This is because hierarchy isn't up to the task of organizing files in the way humans think about files. The answer of course is some form of file tagging, so that 'scuba' can be a single distinct group that overlaps with both 'books' and 'vacation' and 'photos', but isn't a strict subset of any of those.

zrm 8y ago
> The answer of course is some form of file tagging, so that 'scuba' can be a single distinct group that overlaps with both 'books' and 'vacation' and 'photos', but isn't a strict subset of any of those. But that is separate from what file paths are for, which is essentially a semantically meaningful unique identifier. If you want to take a photo with the camera app, crop it with the image editor app, then attach it to an email with the email app, you shouldn't have to search through your photos again the second two times to re-find the one you're already working on. There ought to be something equivalent to copying the file path to the clipboard so that you can reference the file you're already working with in another app.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  > "But that is separate from what file paths are for" This is close to my core point. File paths and/or file hierarchies are not good for file organization. They have been pressed into this role for historic reasons and out of inertia. Papering over the problems of file hierarchies by implementing a good copy-paste system is not a good solution to the fundamental problem. It alleviates some problems, but not all. You can conceivably copy-paste a file you've been working on in one app into another, but what if you want to retrieve a file you last interacted with a year ago? How will you find that file? Under the file hierarchy scheme, in order to retrieve an old file the user must remember the idiosyncrasies of the hierarchy they created ages ago, with many concepts invariably being split into gods know how many subdirectories, OR nearly all of their files sitting in a small handful of directories, unorganized, with little more than the file name to help retrieve the desired file. These are both poor states of affairs. They require the user to store too much extraneous state about the system in their head in order to have any chance of efficiently finding the files they're looking for. Modern systems have begun to improve on this state of affairs by implementing file searching capabilities that function more like internet search engines than traditional hierarchical directory explorers. In theory the user may be able to simply search "scuba" and the black box file search system may use a variety of methods for pulling up a list of files from numerous different subdirectories it believes to be scuba related. Perhaps it pulls in both /vacations/2017/scuba/neat-fish.jpg and /books/scuba/how-to-scuba.epub because both have the string "scuba" in their path. Or perhaps there is some exotic shit going on behind the scenes and an image classifier was previously used to determine the presence of scuba gear in /Pictures/1002389943-984983-198395.jpg This sort of file search engine is fundamentally an imperfect file tagging system. The tagging in this case is being done automatically in a variety of ways the user may or may not be aware of and understand, and may or may not be able to consciously influence and exploit. Let's take a step back for a moment and define the problem: In the mind of the user, there exists a many-to-many mapping between files and concepts. When a user is thinking of a particular file, they have in mind a set of traits about that file. (For example, the user might be thinking of "that picture I took of a strange fish while scuba diving on vacation." The concepts associated with that file might be picture, fish, scuba, vacation.) How do we get that mapping out of the user's head and into the computer, such that it can be used by the computer to retrieve the files a user desires when thinking about a particular set of concepts? That's not yet a question with a definite answer. Automatic tagging of files with concepts the user is anticipated to have should certainly play a role. Image classification is heavy, and therefore has privacy implications since that sort of thing is virtually always offloaded to some corporate server, but when it works well it's great. There are easy sources for automatic tags as well, such as extracting terms out of the file path, or extracting date ranges or even geolocation out of the file metadata. These are great, but typically prove insufficient on their own. Asking the user to manually tag their files with the concepts they associate each file with gets you a very high quality many-to-many mapping between files and concepts, but that is manually intensive. Notoriously so. One solution is to amortize it; during file creation ask the user to tag the file instead of naming the file. That's okay, but still not great. The user might be snapping 10 photos a second and not care to take the time to tag or even name each individual file. How do we meet the needs of that sort of user? A solution I've been exploring is the creation of statistical models that assist the user in manual tagging, to blur the line between automatic and manual tagging. Here is what I mean by that: suppose the user imports 500 new jpg images, with metadata suggesting they were all taken in within a half hour of each other. The user tags ONE of those pictures with "vacation". What is the probability that the remaining pictures in that set are also vacation pictures? Pretty high. (Of course that's a trivial example, the user could just as well import the images all at once in a directory called 'vacation', but this goes back to my earlier point of extracting the many-to-many mapping that exists in the user's head. 'vacation' is merely one tag. By constructing the right statistical models, we can support an arbitrary number of tags.

m-p-3 8y ago

Having dealt with many technologically inept users in many departments including HR and Finance, I can confidently say that file hierarchy was NOT a concept they were struggling with compared to others.