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It’s really quite simple. Spatial memory is a viable system when you have tens of folders and hundreds of files. Once you have thousands of folders and millions

It’s really quite simple. Spatial memory is a viable system when you have tens of folders and hundreds of files. Once you have thousands of folders and millions of files, the metaphor rapidly becomes a hinderance. By analogy, think of the contents of your pantry versus the contents of your local supermarket. You can comprehend the former spatially, whereas the latter is mostly navigated hierarchically. Sure, you can usually remember where the bread aisle is — and then someone updates the operating system and bread gets moved to the other side of the store.

chongli 5y ago
You bring up the example of a supermarket and another comment brought up a public library as examples of buildings with much larger collections that can’t be relied on for spatial navigation. I think both of these examples show exactly the opposite. Ask any librarian or supermarket shelf stocker how they locate things in the building: the answer is spatial! They have an intuitive picture in their mind of where everything is located, not only in terms of which shelf the object is on but how those shelves actually look based on the relative positions of everything on them. then someone updates the operating system and bread gets moved to the other side of the store This never happened in the classic Mac Finder and it certainly doesn’t happen in a supermarket or library. The fact that modern computers do this is another strike against them and in favour of the old spatial Finder. It’s the principle of least surprise. The more your computer works to keep everything exactly the way you left it the more comfortable you’ll feel as a user, confident that nothing will move around when you’re not looking. The fact that today’s operating systems are so much more jam packed with extra features — and that this may complicate the task of preserving user’s spatial memory — is not a point in their favour.
- simondotau 5y ago
  The library example is spatial in the sense that results being returned in alphabetical order is spatial. You will intuitively expect "Yellow" to be towards the bottom. But that's not really spatial memory, even though it has superficial similarities. Between 1985 and 1995 I was almost exclusively using the Macintosh platform. The spatial memory of Finder is a native concept for me. > The fact that today’s operating systems are so much more jam packed with extra features — and that this may complicate the task of preserving user’s spatial memory — is not a point in their favour. Nonsense, it's entirely a point in their favour. As much as we might have nostalgia for simpler computers of our youth, our expectation of what functions are included within a consumer-facing operating system have dramatically and permanently expanded. From Bluetooth to Unicode, modern operating systems are devilishly complicated—and we rarely stop to see just how far we've come.
  - chongli 5y ago
    The library example is spatial in the sense that results being returned in alphabetical order is spatial. You will intuitively expect "Yellow" to be towards the bottom. But that's not really spatial memory, even though it has superficial similarities. I mean a real library, not an abstract one. If you work in a real library every day you don’t need to scan the titles or author names alphabetically, you can see and remember spatially where everything is, at a glance. This means you can walk directly to the book you’re looking for without even glancing at the the other titles! From Bluetooth to Unicode, modern operating systems are devilishly complicated—and we rarely stop to see just how far we've come. These are foundational technologies that definitely make life better for users but there is no reason this needs to be reflected in dramatically greater interface complexity and reduced usability. Most of this complexity can and should be made invisible to the user. The fact that we haven’t succeeded at that is a reflection of the tradeoffs required to compete in the modern industry. But that is not to say we couldn’t do a whole lot better. I think modern operating systems have left whole classes of users behind due to their obtuseness.
    - simondotau 5y ago
      I’m sorry, my language was unclear. When I said it was equivalent to results been returned in alphabetical order, I was referring to the library being ordered by the Dewey Decimal system. In this respect the librarian is acting as an L2 data cache and benefiting from the relatively static nature of the content in order to map spatial memory onto the corpus. In reality, the computer files which you care to organise and access frequently are changing often, whereas the need to physically shuffle major sections of a library would happen perhaps once or twice every decade. As for the increasing complexity of operating systems, I simply outright reject the claim that macOS Monterey is more complex of a user experience than, say, Snow Leopard from over a decade ago. What the operating system does and the features it contains a massively greater, but the experience exposed to the user is incredibly similar.

chongli 5y ago

You bring up the example of a supermarket and another comment brought up a public library as examples of buildings with much larger collections that can’t be relied on for spatial navigation. I think both of these examples show exactly the opposite. Ask any librarian or supermarket shelf stocker how they locate things in the building: the answer is spatial! They have an intuitive picture in their mind of where everything is located, not only in terms of which shelf the object is on but how those shelves actually look based on the relative positions of everything on them. then someone updates the operating system and bread gets moved to the other side of the store This never happened in the classic Mac Finder and it certainly doesn’t happen in a supermarket or library. The fact that modern computers do this is another strike against them and in favour of the old spatial Finder. It’s the principle of least surprise. The more your computer works to keep everything exactly the way you left it the more comfortable you’ll feel as a user, confident that nothing will move around when you’re not looking. The fact that today’s operating systems are so much more jam packed with extra features — and that this may complicate the task of preserving user’s spatial memory — is not a point in their favour.

simondotau 5y ago
The library example is spatial in the sense that results being returned in alphabetical order is spatial. You will intuitively expect "Yellow" to be towards the bottom. But that's not really spatial memory, even though it has superficial similarities. Between 1985 and 1995 I was almost exclusively using the Macintosh platform. The spatial memory of Finder is a native concept for me. > The fact that today’s operating systems are so much more jam packed with extra features — and that this may complicate the task of preserving user’s spatial memory — is not a point in their favour. Nonsense, it's entirely a point in their favour. As much as we might have nostalgia for simpler computers of our youth, our expectation of what functions are included within a consumer-facing operating system have dramatically and permanently expanded. From Bluetooth to Unicode, modern operating systems are devilishly complicated—and we rarely stop to see just how far we've come.
- chongli 5y ago
  The library example is spatial in the sense that results being returned in alphabetical order is spatial. You will intuitively expect "Yellow" to be towards the bottom. But that's not really spatial memory, even though it has superficial similarities. I mean a real library, not an abstract one. If you work in a real library every day you don’t need to scan the titles or author names alphabetically, you can see and remember spatially where everything is, at a glance. This means you can walk directly to the book you’re looking for without even glancing at the the other titles! From Bluetooth to Unicode, modern operating systems are devilishly complicated—and we rarely stop to see just how far we've come. These are foundational technologies that definitely make life better for users but there is no reason this needs to be reflected in dramatically greater interface complexity and reduced usability. Most of this complexity can and should be made invisible to the user. The fact that we haven’t succeeded at that is a reflection of the tradeoffs required to compete in the modern industry. But that is not to say we couldn’t do a whole lot better. I think modern operating systems have left whole classes of users behind due to their obtuseness.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    I’m sorry, my language was unclear. When I said it was equivalent to results been returned in alphabetical order, I was referring to the library being ordered by the Dewey Decimal system. In this respect the librarian is acting as an L2 data cache and benefiting from the relatively static nature of the content in order to map spatial memory onto the corpus. In reality, the computer files which you care to organise and access frequently are changing often, whereas the need to physically shuffle major sections of a library would happen perhaps once or twice every decade. As for the increasing complexity of operating systems, I simply outright reject the claim that macOS Monterey is more complex of a user experience than, say, Snow Leopard from over a decade ago. What the operating system does and the features it contains a massively greater, but the experience exposed to the user is incredibly similar.