What's with this anti-directory structure movement?

http://www.osnews.com/story/26220/What_s_with_this_anti-directory_structure_movement_

by wim • 14 years ago

229 265 14 years ago

rynes• 14 years ago

I read somewhere that Apple uses hard links to directories for time machine.

epo3• 14 years ago

It is one way to avoid storing duplicates, which is important for a versioned backup system. If you're smart enough to avoid loops then it is a reasonable thing to do.

jwl• 14 years ago

Maybe it started with music playlists. My digital music collection is largely in the same folder structure as it was 15 years ago, but every music player wants to make a library based on metatags, which in theory makes sense, but then just adds the problem of giving everything suitable metatags. Building your own file structure based on your own needs just seems easier and simpler.

andybak3• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with tags for music libraries - just that ID3 and the tooling around it sucks - especially genre handling, the artist/performer distinction and the inability to handle my own arbitrary grouping that doesn't correspond to any release information.

I love apps that allow me to easily switch between using tags and using my own folders.

emilis_info• 14 years ago

Can you recommend any of the apps?

damian2000• 14 years ago

I think that isolating data and applications into their own directory on a PC makes total sense.

But there was something that I read to do with organizing your email inbox into folders which is sort of related. A study found that people who organise their inbox into multiple sub-folders don't get any benefit at all compared to those that have just one big inbox; when they want to find something, they just sort by 'from', 'date', 'subject' or do a find text.

ballooney• 14 years ago

  I think that isolating data and applications into 
  their own directory on a PC makes total sense.

Only if you're starting from a position where there is only one kind of application to handle one kind of data. But as a counter example to that, the entire philosophical underpinning on unix is that stuff should be plain text so it can be easily handed between different programs.

I can just imagine the day when I try and pipe the output of one command into another and an ascii paperclip pops up in my cli to scold me for trying to use cat's 'data' with uniq, or something. I shall keep a cyanide pill handy in my desk drawer for such an occasion.

andybak3• 14 years ago

There is a flaw with directories and hierarchical storage and it's not their conceptual complexity.

Gmail made a move away from folders and it's one that I've embraced.

1. It's easy to spend too long manually organizing things into folders. It's the kind of relaxing, busy-work we can fall into to avoid the hard stuff we're supposed to be doing.

2. There are many arbitrary ways to rearrange hierarchies and no clear limit for how deep they should be. Many of us with slight OCD-ish tendencies can fall down the rabbit-hole here.

3. It's manual work that the computer should partially be doing for us.

There are ways to mitigate these problems. Multiple views of the same structure, tags instead of folders and easily accessibly, instantaneous search can teach us to be less dogmatic about our directories.

I very rarely need to use tags/folders with my email now. Search works for me 90% of the time. It's only special tasks such as doing my tax returns or tracking a particularly complex bunch of emails where I might use tags. I think my file system is probably an order of magnitude more complicated and there is less automatic metadata with files (my file system doesn't know what project a file is related unless I tell it whereas you can tell a lot about an email just using from/to/cc fields.)

At this point I was hoping to end on some kind of conclusion but I can't think of one.

hmmyeah5• 14 years ago

The ways something can be abused are not arguments against proper use of it.

"It's manual work that the computer should partially be doing for us."

I disagree, partially ^^ Tags, or where something is located; both can be part of the content.

The cool thing about folders is, if you don't want them, simply don't create them... but don't take it away from those who do themselves more good than harm with it, please :/

w0utert4• 14 years ago

> The ways something can be abused are not arguments against proper use of it.

While true, the rate at which things are abused appears to be highly correlated to how convenient or user-friendly they are, or how well they solve the problem they are supposed to be solving.

Just looking at how many people have desktops crowded with every document they ever opened, or how many computer-illiterate friends and relatives have asked me how they should backup or transfer their files to and from other computers, because they don't even know you can actually get to them by other means than the 'open file' dialog in their Word Processor, signals to me that many people don't really think organizing files using folders is something they need or want.

wtetzner• 14 years ago

> The cool thing about folders is, if you don't want them, simply don't create them

The cool thing about tags is that you could have multiple ways of viewing them, including a hierarchical folder-like view.

I don't have anything against folders, I just think that tagging is more or less a super set of what folders can do.

gbog5• 14 years ago

> Gmail made a move away from folders

You are equalling emails with files, which is not within the point of the OP.

Files are things you store for reuse. Emails are mostly things you should throw right away after reading them. Some emails should become files because they are important. That's why in "normal companies" most people work with attachments, which is a gigantic PITA, but fit with the "Files are important things I need to store for reuse" model.

andybak3• 14 years ago

I was using emails as a parallel. Some conclusions can be drawn from that.

wickedchicken• 14 years ago

A directory structure is too restrictive, much like Java and C++ inheritance. Cluster and search based file access is way more flexible and fluid, but we haven't had a good UI or overlay onto traditional filesystems yet. Think of Go's interface model, but for files.

Imagine you have a file that is a vendor-provided html template. Does it go in vendor/ or templates/? vendor/templates? What if you want to find out all the templates in use by the system? Document that somewhere and expect a newhire to 'just know' where you store the fragments of your templates?

Sometimes there really isn't a parent-child relationship between data, modeling it like that is always true seems very 1980s.

Perhaps Rob Pike can sum it up better than I can:

"My late friend Alain Fournier once told me that he considered the lowest form of academic work to be taxonomy. And you know what? Type hierarchies are just taxonomy. You need to decide what piece goes in what box, every type's parent, whether A inherits from B or B from A. Is a sortable array an array that sorts or a sorter represented by an array? If you believe that types address all design issues you must make that decision.

I believe that's a preposterous way to think about programming. What matters isn't the ancestor relations between things but what they can do for you."

super_mario6• 14 years ago

Again, these two are not mutually exclusive. You can store your files in a tree structure, yet unify various nodes by tags or index of concepts.

For example, if I store my photos by Year/Year-Month/Day/

and I'm interested in pictures of my son in the last year, it does not mean these pictures have to be all in the same flat one year folder. It is doable today in spotlight

$ mdfind -interpret "kind:image name date:>1/1/2012"

webjunkie• 14 years ago

I think at some point Apple will sell us "folders within folders" as a gorgeous update that took so long to really get it right.

zalew• 14 years ago

and patent it.

ajasmin• 14 years ago

We are seeing a comeback of folders within apps in the form of play-lists and photo albums. But they're smarter, synced to the cloud, searchable, sharable and auto-categorized.

The PC is evolving and it's not clear who it will work in a few years.

It's like these great touch screens to which people insist on attaching keyboards. Leading to thing like the Asus Transformer and MS Surface.

There's a lot of experimentation going on still and it may take some time before the "post PC" gets to it's final form. It's fun to watch though.

berryg• 14 years ago

Some people can handle directories just fine. But, a lot of people simply do not grasp the concept. For many, many years I have been trying to explain hard disks, folders and files to family members. They simply don't understand the concept. Opening a folder and double clicking on a file to open it and a program to read the file starts: they do not understand it.

For these ordinary users of computer appliances the iOS way of handling files is simply a blessing. You use an application to do something, to write a text, to listen to music, to communicate. Applications that can interact with each other, will interact with each other. Simple.

For an ordinary computer appliance user it is not necessary to be confronted with a file system. Just as a lot of other technical details are hidden from ordinary users.

ehutch796• 14 years ago

maybe they just don't want to learn?

Someone4• 14 years ago

One opinion, repeated a zillion times, does not make an argument; it makes a rant.

I see only a few arguments in this text:

- the author does not think nested hierarchies are difficult. If he added "for nerds", I would agree with him.

- the author equates having limited nesting with the 'data silos' situation on iOS and (from what I read in reviews), in slightly lesser sense on Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

- claiming that the mouse is hard to use because it provides "indirect manipulation". That may seem so, but the human brain is exceptionally good at transferring motor skills between modalities. For example, anybody who can write can write with his feet, nose, car, or whatever, and the handwriting will (except for the quality of fine motor skills) be recognizable as yours (http://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/read/211551/)

- equating having limited nesting with vendor lock-in. Proprietary file formats are fine for doing that. I do not see why you would need to do anything more.

hmmyeah5• 14 years ago

"the author does not think nested hierarchies are difficult. If he added "for nerds", I would agree with him."

Imagine you badly need to go to the bathroom, and the only building nearby is a huge hospital... will all the complexity hidden away in the various sections, rooms, and the patients themselves, delay your quest for the toilet even one second?

Also, the brain can only keep a bunch of things in mind at a time,no matter how they're presented. When complexity crosses the threshold, we group stuff together. And we also do this with a flat list, in some way or another. Reality and our concept of it is very deeply nested, but since we only handle a bunch of abstractions at the same time, that's fine.

With folders, you have something that is explorable. You can still search, but if you don't have folders to begin with, you can only search -- and anything you don't think of searching for is either lost forever, or can be seen only as part of a huuuuuge list.

IMHO it's regression alright, no two ways about it.

cstross2• 14 years ago

From the article: I have honestly never seen a single person have any issues with directories, nested or no, and as old as the concept might be, the people I interact with seem to be able to handle it just fine.

Twitch.

The author's clearly been interacting with different people from the ones I know. 80-somethings who didn't grow up with computers frequently get hopelessly confused by directories. The philosophy professor who's been using a Mac since the mid-80s is a bit harder to explain. And then there was the time I got called in in the early 90s to fix the office PC used by a succession of secretaries -- running MS-DOS -- and discovered they'd saved something over 2000 Word Perfect files in the root directory because none of the temps the company had employed over a 12 month period had ever heard of directories.

In my experience many casual users (for values of something like 10%-50% of computer users these days) simply do not "get" hierarchical storage at all; they find it as baffling as predicate calculus. Hence the desire of some software vendors -- who are trying to provide machines that anyone can use without training -- to move away from it, at least on the user's side.

gaius3• 14 years ago

It's a question of jargon. What does the layperson think of when they hear "directory", a telephone directory? Whereas if you call them "folders" or even better, as on the Amiga, "drawers", then it all becomes very obvious.

rimantas• 14 years ago

The problem is not directory, it's the hierarchy. The first time I have this described was a looong time ago when reading Alan Cooper's "About Face". I guess this is not news to anyone who is interested in UI and UX.

Someone4• 14 years ago

Obvious? Then you must be in favour of Apple's move to 'at most one level of hierarchy'. Or do you find the concept of drawers inside drawers inside drawers intuitive?

olavk2• 14 years ago

Not really - it is not very intuitive that you put folders into folders and have all your documents in one big folder containing all your other folders. And you don't have drawers containing other drawers either, in the real world.

But apart from bad metaphors, I thing non-geeks have a problem with organizing things in arbitrary deep hierarchies. You don't really do that a lot outside of computing.

acabal3• 14 years ago

I don't know. I think that at a certain point people have to accept that there are just some things must be learned in order to operate a computer. It would be nice if computers could just read the mind of the user, but until then, the user must learn some things about how the computer operates. Folders, I think, is one of those things.

In the end, some knowledge is required. If we remove folders, then that knowledge will change from "What is a folder, and where did I put that file?" to "What is an application, and which one did I use to create that file, and how do I get that file from one application to another?" (Think word processing program to email attachment.)

Either way, the end user has to learn something. We can continue dumbing down concepts and interfaces with the noble goal of making it easier for the people who just don't want to understand how computers work (let's face it, learning basic folder manipulation isn't hard, especially with Google--or a manual or family member, for those who can't even use Google), but there will always be a lazier person, and eventually we'll end up dumbing things down until they become useless.

Maybe the better solution is to have a better "Home" folder concept. I don't know how it is in OSX, but in Windows the home folder is a confusing collection of sample files, folder-spam from other apps, and "library" views that masks the entire concept, but only sometimes. Fixing that mess and making it more like, say, a Linux home folder (/home/acabal/videos/) would be a good starting point without losing the usefulness of folders altogether.

tsahyt6• 14 years ago

> I think that at a certain point people have to accept that there are just some things must be learned in order to operate a computer.

This! I personally like the idea of learning concepts in order to be able to make sense of a computer or it's applications. One might argue that the learning curve is too steep for some users, but on this particular topic it just isn't. Come on, we've been putting stuff into boxes for ages. In a metaphorical sense we put everything in boxes and label them in some way. Directories do exactly that. We're used to it and, as much as I hate those three words, "it just works".

Trying to make every last bit of a computer absolutely idiot-proof harms productivity (compare poweruser tools to what-your-grandma-uses) and may even scare away those who actually have to get work done.

I believe we've actually reached the point where the "dumbing down" started a while ago, and it's a rather bad trend.

cstross2• 14 years ago

* I think that at a certain point people have to accept that there are just some things must be learned in order to operate a computer.*

That statement encapsulates an ideological outlook.

I, personally, agree with you. (I happen to have a CS degree and used to work in the industry: of course I agree with you!)

However, purely pragmatically, a lot of people don't agree with that position. They no more want to know how their computer works than they want to know how to adjust the ignition timing on their car. Yes, in principle they could learn that stuff; but they consider it to be a waste of their valuable time, for which they have other priorities.

By way of an analogy: we're in the position of 17th century puritans asserting that of course everyone must learn to read so they can read the Bible for themselves and interpret the word of god directly. (While a large chunk of the audience at the time disagreed strongly and wanted to leave that to the priests.)

That's how things are for a large chunk of the general public, whether we want it to be so or not. And as computer use becomes a universal, pervasive element of society, we're going to run up against it increasingly.

rahoulb2• 14 years ago

I honestly believe that there are some people who simply don't "get" hierarchical folder structures. And it's not a small percentage.

Years ago when Windows Explorer tree-views were all the rage our desktop app had them all over the place. And the number of support requests were phenomenal. We'd demonstrate the tree-view - expanding out folder nodes till you find what you want, the user would go "Oh that's how it works" and then a few days later would ring up with the same request. I think there's just some part of their brain that can't deal with the geometry of it or something.

johnchristopher• 14 years ago

I am a man and when I first had to do the laundry with our new washing machine I read the manual supplied by the manufacturer. I did the same with a lot of kitchen and household appliances.

So why in hell people whose daily jobs consist of interacting with Word and the computer and managing files are exempted of reading their computer's manual ?! Nobody is asking them to learn a programming language (well, that fad died last week) or compute binary soustraction. Just use some folders (and learn a shortcut or two like ctrl+v, ctrl+c).

I admit good introduction material to "the computer" are a rare thing nowadays (there is a market!) and I remember the win95/98 introduction to the mouse was something good and an interactive learning software should be made available on every platform (I believe ubuntu would grasp billions of users if they provided something like that).

Not getting hierarchical storage is like... I don't know... not getting the subway schedule ? Or how to operate a tv remote ?

ehutch796• 14 years ago

i experience with these types of people has been tht they're not failing to understand folders, they're going 'i dont like new things, therefore i refuse to understand this'

astine• 14 years ago

I'll bet it wasn't the concept of directories that those secretaries of yours had trouble with. I'll bet that they simply weren't told that they existed and the computer offered no hints and that when they were told, they understood it readily.

My mom frequently has trouble with directories but it's not the concept she has trouble with. It's the fact that the filesystem is so huge that it's hard to manage and there is no way she keep where everything is in her head. The fact that operating system files, application files, and user created files are mixed rather indiscriminately is probably the biggest problem. Also photo-managing applications trying to make things simple by saving files but not telling her where they put them leads to a lot of confusion. But the idea of files and folders she has not trouble with; it's the difficulty of navigating an impossibly huge and insufficiently mapped directory structure that she has trouble with.

The concept of folders is pretty straightforward: "Everything has its place and there's a place for everything." People naturally organize things through place and directories create a semblance of 'place' for abstract pieces of data. (Place is actually such a powerful concept in the human mind, that the Jesuits used to memorize complicated arguments and passages by going for walks and assigning concepts to different locations on the way.) Tagging and search based systems while technically more powerful, I think would actually be more confusing not less because the concept is not as intuitive.

jcromartie2• 14 years ago

I'm a programmer and I have problems with files and folders. That's why the UNIX "find" command exists.

w0utert4• 14 years ago

The original article wasn't very good, but this response is even worse. It appears the author is lacking any form of creativity to think beyond the idea that folders are the only paradigm for ordering files that could possibly work.

In practice, if you forget about system files and such, I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder, which they only access through their word processor or whatever they use to open them. They have all their pictures and video in a tool that organizes them into albums and such without them having to deal with folders. They have all their music in a program that keeps them in a library somewhere, which they never manipulate on the file system level. And so on. Or (also very common) they just dump everything they touch on their computer on the desktop. This is not because making folders is 'too complex', but because users can't be bothered to come up with hierarchies to order where there files are 'stored on the file system' or whatever, they just want to make their changes persistent and be able to quickly find their files later.

For the vast majority of people, folders are an anochronism. It's not that they are 'hard' or 'complex', but they are simply not essential, and actually quite limiting for file management. The whole idea that the artefacts you create or consume are best structured as a tree really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Especially not if you want to have all your data available on multiple machines which may have wildly different file systems such as desktops and mobile devices.

This doesn't mean we should all have big piles of files with no ways of structuring them, but it doesn't mean folders are the epitome of file management either. A database-like file system with powerful search options could definitely be much better. From an end-user perspective, organizing files by the applications they can open them also seems to be a pretty good idea to me. Attaching metadata and tags to files so you don't have to superimpose them using a tree-like structure would be a huge improvement.

I'm not saying that what Apple is trying with iOS and now OS X is so great we should all hail it as the future of file management, but personally I think they are moving in the right direction. Ideally, end-users should be able to operate their devices and get to their files without even knowing it has something as abstract as a 'file system'. Just sit down, get the file you want using whatever criterium makes the most sense for finding it, manipulate it, and have the same file available on every other machine. I think this is the vision Apple has, but it will take lots of time to get there.

Also, people mailing files to themselves to get them on their iOS devices literally has nothing to do with how the iOS file system works. Folders or no folders would not make any difference.

tjoff2• 14 years ago

Then again, for many tasks, a tree truly is the best way to structure files (start broad and then home in on a file even if you have no clue about the filename or what the file contains or even the type of the file) and any file management system that doesn't recognize this is seriously flawed.

I got hooked by WinFS (then again it was many many years since I last heard anything about it), a traditional filesystem with a database layer on top seems like a good start.

w0utert4• 14 years ago

Agreed. For example trees of source code seem to fit the hierarchical structure very well, because it can (almost) map directly to projects, modules, submodules and classes, and conveniently separate them from e.g. build products or configuration files. Trees are not evil, but they are not the holy grail of file management either.

From a historical point of view, a traditional filesystem with a database layer on top seems to be the most logical way to go. Personally, I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if someone did it the other way around: create a whole new way of organizing files that doesn't use trees, and allow layering some kind of 'tree view' on top of that.

Someone4• 14 years ago

Truly? So, what is the best way to make a hierarchy of, say MP3s:

- year-performer-composer-star rating

- genre-year-song title

- album title-song title

- ...

You get the same problem almost everywhere. Is it year-project or project-year or maybe customer-year-quarter-project?

Yes, for many tasks, a tree is a good way to structure information. The problem is that the choice of tree can be widely different for different tasks (for example, 'that song you played last week', 'that minute-long guitar riff by X')

I think a hierarchy should be like an index in a database: set by an expert to match the most common access pattern, but not enforcing other access patterns. Hierarchical file systems are good at the former, but atrocious at the latter.

And we sort-of already have WinFS, in the form of full-text indexes on file systems.

bodo_leer3• 14 years ago

> start broad and then home in on a file even if you have no clue about the filename or what the file contains or even the type of the file

But this file system does not construct itself and if you made a mistake while sorting a file you hit the search field after a while anyway, because you can't find the file in any subfolder. You're right, a mixture of both will probably the next step. But it seemed to me that MS isn't trying something new with windows 8 and the metro interface, did they?

jsvaughan• 14 years ago

I think this is because 9/10 people really only have a handful of files (lets say < 50, ignoring photos because they are usually managed by a separate app) that they ever deal with, so one "My Documents" folder with a sort by date option is easy enough to deal with. I don't think it's because people cannot grasp the concept of folders. Alternatively, look at email, where the volume to deal with is far greater. I would say that most Outlook users put their email into folder structures, and I have seen quite elaborate set-ups created by people that are not technical whatsoever.

rogerchucker4• 14 years ago

1. Depending on search for file access for most of the time means either the user has to remember the file name to a certain extent (thereby making it a lookup system) or the file search system has to be smart enough - the former is too burdensome for the user and the latter isn't there yet.

2. Your argument is biased by the idea of using multiple machines - most people don't deal with the _same_ data on different machines. If all those machines have the same fundamental way of organizing files (i.e. through directories) then I don't see how that is unfriendly to the user.

3. File management is mostly needed in scenarios where you create/consumer a lot of files - e.g. lots of PDFs or lots of photos or lots of music. The tree-based directory structure is the most intuitive way to organize files in those scenarios. You cannot possibly claim that most people would be happy with a single flat folder system for these scenarios.

File management is of course unnecessary in cases like notes or reminders where you don't need to be bothered by organizing files for each entry in different layers of directories. But this can't be the determining factor for completely abolishing the directory structure concept.

bodo_leer3• 14 years ago

I can totally agree. The "folder" file structure is a tree structure. This is easily understood if you have a CS background, but for new computer users it could be a huge mental step if try to explain that you can stack folders endlessly into another.

Additionally you have to think in terms of hierarchies instead of groups to make a folder structure work you. Something like: Media > Pictures > 2012 > .....

It seems to me that Apple was never a Fan of folder structures. Just look at the way iPhoto or iTunes work. They basically are a clients to your media library.

I assume the main reason this works is because pictures and audio files already have a fairly big amount of meta data like music genre or location data.

A scenario where I can find all I worked on in the office yesterday wouldn't be that bad.

rogerchucker4• 14 years ago

Jesus Christ, iPhoto lock-in is one of the most scummy things Apple has ever done. You don't have to be a CS student to feel the need to easily move a bunch of photos easily from your local computer to an external storage device or even upload in batch to something like picasa. By completely blocking the user from the directory structure, Apple made sure people would share the iPhoto albums only with a select few that Apple had chosen for us.

smackay• 14 years ago

I completely agree but I would add that a lot of people start out by using folders but it needs a little care and attention to keep it all organized so they end up with a few folders that contain everything.

The beauty of a filesystem is that it is somewhat independent of the applications that use it. So if your photo app index gets borked then you haven't really lost anything too valuable - apart from any meta data that is not stored in the image itself. Put everything in a database and you risk bricking the entire computer as far as the user is concerned. Of course this applies to files and folders as well but these are a little more battle tested.

Way back in the early 1990s Microsoft's Cairo was supposed to be based on an object database which got rid of files and folders. Sine this is a relatively old idea I'd be interested to know why folders have not been replaced yet.

icebraining4• 14 years ago

You're assuming the database is tied to each application; that's only one possible approach.

NEPOMUK (currently a KDE project) is an example of a database which is independent of any particular application. It stores RDF metadata about each file (and about other things too, like contacts, events, etc) and provides a common ground for any application that connects to it.

In the end, the filesystem is just a key-value database too...

jahewson2• 14 years ago

Absolutely. The knee-jerk reaction of the author is painful. Mindless copying of what went before is how we end up with bad ideas being repeated over and over. When we try new things the good will survive, and the bad will be improved or removed. When we merely copy, we maintain the status quo. I'm glad to see Apple innovating, and I'd love a system which mostly gets rid of folders to be a success. Let's watch this space.

It took about 10 years for my mother, a daily Windows user, to understand folders. I lost count of how many times I explained it. The previous generation seem to particularly struggle with digitally-native concepts.

Folders are of course a broken metaphor. In the real world folders are not placed inside other folders - it makes no sense! The entire file concept is anachronistic, why do I care how the document is stored? Why do I even have to save? Why can't I undo after closing and re-opening a program? Why a I forced to give a document a name on disk when it already has a title? Etc...

Over the years I've moved from a fairly hierarchical arrangement of my files to one closer to maybe two levels (source code excluded), the congnitive burden is so much less - it's the advent of indexed search which has made this possible.

kwekly• 14 years ago

Files are sorted into filing cabinets or boxes, which are stored on shelves, in different rooms etc.

jasonlotito• 14 years ago

> I'm glad to see Apple innovating, and I'd love a system which mostly gets rid of folders to be a success.

Okay, let's not get carried away here. They aren't doing anything new. This is old hat, and they are just now working it into OSX. This isn't some Apple invented paradigm, this has been played with many times over.

crazygringo2• 14 years ago

> It took about 10 years for my mother, a daily Windows user, to understand folders.

Are you really sure about that? I have a hunch the difficulty wasn't with the folders themselves, but rather the badly-designed navigation interface of the Open dialog, and where it's starting from.

I've found that understanding the folder concept is one of the easiest things for new computer users to grasp.

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

"In practice, if you forget about system files and such, I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder, which they only access through their word processor or whatever they use to open them."

9 out of 10 home / casual users: perhaps true. Among teachers using the 70 staff computers in this large open plan office, there is an amazing variety of carefully organised folder structures and layouts that typically, for each teacher, organise 8 to 10 courses each consisting of two sessions a week for 36 weeks. With overlap. And shared folders with colleagues.

If we used Mac OS X instead of Windows, it it really is the case that you can only have one level of folder, then my colleagues would have to recreate their heirarchies using file naming conventions. Messy, and hard to manipulate.

A database approach might yield an actual benefit: I'm assuming that would look a bit like Outlook's message view where clicking on the from, received, subject fields allows an instant reordering of the material. But tree like re-orderings would be needed to allow my colleagues to continue to organise their content as they do now.

Part of me likes the Jef Raskin approach, the content is the file name and you use incremental search to find a particular part of your work. It is hard to see how that works for media files.

I have no issues with changing how we organise material, but there does seem to be a shift in assumptions on how people will use their computers towards the superficial media stoage and comsumption sort of model. That won't fit everyone at all.

eyko• 14 years ago

No, in Mac OS X you can have as many levels of folders as you want. I'm not sure what the article is trying to say… In fact, Mac OS X still relies in directory structure to… well, give structure to its filesystem. We still have /usr, /Volumes, /Users, /etc, et al.

fnl• 14 years ago

> I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder, which they only access through their word processor or whatever they use to open them

I could not agree less: Most people I know follow about the regular OS distribution, ie., most on Windows, some on Linux, and a few on OSX, plus the odd geek using what-not... The only cases that matches your "9/10 observations" are the few guys using OSX, and even then many converted from Windows and keep using their OS just as they did before. And everybody else is using a system where he cannot easily organize stuff through apps (ie., we probably all agree that OSX has the best inter-app interoperability) or otherwise is experienced enough to want full control of their own data and therefore keeps his data organized, eg., in a Dropbox folder hierarchy. And given the majority of people I know are Windows users with very little "IT knowledge", their behaviour is what I would put into the majority bin. According to my own obeservations at least, nearly all of these user-types rely on some increadibly convoluted folder hierarchy to store their music, photos, documents and the odd video.

Note that I am not arguing about the best way to organize folders and files, all I am saying is that AFAIK the very large majority of users does organize their files in deep folder structures (and, is using Windows Explorer to do that, too...).

corford• 14 years ago

At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc. I find it completely natural and a very easy way to file stuff. When I go to the bank, I take my banking folder with me. When I go to the insurance company, I take my insurance folder with me. My Mum and Dad (and likely most other people in the world) also have a similar system in their house.

I store my digital files in a similarly compartamentalized, hierarchical manner. It may come as a surprise to you but my Mum and Dad (who are approaching 60 and are not exactly clued up computer users) also do the same thing on their PCs (dad with his various excel sheets and word docs, mum with her photos). Of all the brain dead questions they ask me to do with their computers and the various tech problems they have, understanding folders and using them is literally something that has never come up. The paradigm is immediately obvious to them and they find it a natural way to catalogue and store their files. This notion that a user is too lazy to organise their files is simply something I have NEVER seen (and I've seen quite a lot when it comes to bad computer users).

If my parents were to be given a computer that had no concept of directories it would be a disaster. They would be just as lost as when I try to explain to them that the email they see in Thunderbird is the same as the one they see via webmail because Thunderbird is accessing their mail account through IMAP. To them that just sounds like magic. They much preferred it when they used to get their email via POP. Oh, and guess how they organise their email? Yep, lots of folders. I don't think they've ever used the tagging and advanced search features offered by Thunderbird.

I'm the same and it would fill me with rage having to exclusively interact with all my files through a GUI front end to an sqlite database. Which effectively is what we're talking about here. I can't think of anything more non-intuitive or pointless.

kokey• 14 years ago

I think it's highly dependent on the type of person, or family. For example I have had to help many people track down their documents which are somewhere in a download or documents folder. I, personally, am not the kind of person who sorts my paperwork into folders. Neither, like some people, do I organise every single e-mail into a folder. Gmail has understood this well, and makes it easier to find what I want. I find it much easier to make sure I know _when_ something happened, I make sure I e-mail myself notes, and copies of documents, but most of the time it happens by itself anyway, so I can search for them in Gmail. For example if I want to find some paperwork done when we moved into a new house, I can track down the date in Gmail, and know in which box to go dig it up. Most of the time what I need has an e-mail record somewhere.

That said, I strongly support allowing people to approach the problem from both sides, chronological with good tagging/searching or being able to organise things into folders in a way they like. People work in different ways. However, I think the default is to be disorganised, and the best way to deal with being disorganised is to keep it as simple as possible.

prof_hobart4• 14 years ago

But physical paper has basic restrictions that digital media doesn't - like lack of easily searchable metadata, and being able to be in multiple groups at one time.

My photos (many thousands of them) are stored in folders by date, but I pretty much never search them that way. I use Lightroom, which automaticaly puts basic stuff like date in there, and allows me to tag every photo with things location, themes, people, ratings etc. It also allows me to put them into (multiple, if I want) groups. And it's combinations of these things that I use to locate my photos - e.g. all the photos of my daughter in Berlin in 2008.

My music is little different - I might fancy listening to a specific album, or a random bunch of jazz tracks or whatever. I get to them through my music app, not through the filesystem.

Some other stuff still relies more on basic directory structures, but that's only because I've not found a suitable set of tools that provide me with a full metadata approach just yet.

And yes, a lot of people would probably initially struggle with moving away from directories and over to a metadata-based world, but that's more to do with the fact that it's what they are currently used to than it being a fundamentally better approach.

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

From what I've seen on the computers I've used, non-technical people seem to have far better filing systems in general. My mum and dad both organise their files and emails impeccably, whereas my file structure is so badly organised I can literally lose files for years before rediscovering them like an archeologist on a dig.

vorg• 14 years ago

> At home, I have a rack of shelves with box and manilla folders. Each one contains different things like house bills, banking statements, insurance docs etc.

Inside one of the manila folders, do you keep an apartment building, with 12 floors, each floor with 20 apartments, each apartment with 3 rooms, each with 4 racks, 3 shelves on each, each shelf with 50 manila folders? Inside one folder, do you keep a wormhole to the 2nd bedroom in apartment 1409 in the building 2 doors down from the apartment building I first mentioned?

I think having levels of folders is a good idea, each level with different names, e.g. 4 levels: house, room, shelf, and folder.

pwpwp• 14 years ago

As I understood it, the author didn't claim folders were the epitome of file management, but rather lamenting that newer systems don't even give us folders.

Confusion• 14 years ago

  They have all their pictures and video in a tool that 
  organizes them into albums and such without them having to 
  deal with folders.

Yeah, and they organize their albums by category, containing albums by year. Or they organize theyr albums by genre, containing albums by artist, containing albums in chronological order.

And how exactly does that differ from folders and does that support the point of the OP, that folders aren't difficult?

nchlswu• 14 years ago

Referring specifically to something like iPhoto or iTunes, the general purpose or intended paradigm is that users don't have to manage file folders or folder structures themselves.

The whole idea is that users can't do it, especially when complexity increases (it's not a given that power users are great at this either) and that everything you have should just work (when you upload photos, it's organized by location date, etc., on import, automatically or music is automatically there).

bambax• 14 years ago

> I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder, which they only access through their word processor or whatever they use to open them.

This is demonstrably false. Like probably many HNers I'm the "computer guy" for my family and friends; I have seen dozens of machines used by non-technical people, some as old as 80 years old, some as young as 10. Not one of them does what you say.

Everyone I know organizes their files in a directory structure (for pictures, usually by year/event, for example).

Spooky235• 14 years ago

Your thought process is precisely how vendors like Apple are arriving at this conclusion. The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.

The oh-so-quaint folder metaphor directly correlates to how humans do things in the physical world. I put my winter coat in a closet. My winter scarf, boots, hat and gloves are also in the closet, but in a box on a shelf.

My system may not be the same as yours, but it works for me. Dumping my winter stuff with all of my clothing on a pile, and affixing a blue tag on it to represent "winter stuff" isn't improving things. Installing a database-backed clothing management system like you would find at a dry cleaner in my house solves my organizational problem, but introduces alot of complexity and overhead.

Let's be real here. The reason that Apple is doing this is that have had success in delivering a dumbed-down API that makes their life much easier on phones, and prevents pesky third party software developers from doing dangerous things like allowing applications to talk to each other. They've decided to bring this innovation to the general purpose computer.

colanderman2• 14 years ago

Dumping my winter stuff with all of my clothing on a pile, and affixing a blue tag on it to represent "winter stuff" isn't improving things.

It's a strict improvement (in the mathematical sense) if the tagging system allows you to view items with no tags.

Tooluka• 14 years ago

Shoes are simple. But where did you put the backup debit bank card? To the "finance" stuff? Or to the "plastic card" pile? Where to put spare photos for documents - near the foreign passport cause you'll surely need both of them next time? Or to the unsorted photos pile? Where should we put spare screws from a new shelf - on that shelf or in the toolbox with other screws? Etc. etc.

This is why directories are getting old - they allow only one tag for a file - the folder name. New systems, like iTunes and others are introducing concept of advanced tags - you can find the same file in the Author "dir" in the Genre "dir" in the Type "dir" etc. They aren't perfect yet but they are being refined all will be dominant in the future.

beala• 14 years ago

>Installing a database-backed clothing management system like you would find at a dry cleaner in my house solves my organizational problem, but introduces alot of complexity and overhead.

This would be complex to implement, but would greatly simplify things for the user.

Imagine I had a big box I could throw all my stuff into, and when I wanted, say, my shoes, I could just say "Computer, retrieve winter boots" and my personal robot would pulled it out of the box for me. This would be awesome. Sure it would be complicated to implement a physical system like this, but storing an retrieving files in this way is easy. OS X's Spotlight gets us most of the way there. Now we just need tags.

maxerickson• 14 years ago

The pile analogy implies that all interaction with the computer takes place using a visual metaphor, rummaging through the pile.

I like folders just fine (exactly because they let me pile arbitrary things together however I feel like), but not having some facility to search for things is just as bad as not having folders.

One nice thing about database style systems is that they don't actually have to own the canonical version of some information in order to be able to index that information. So let's keep our folders, but let's also have nice search facilities that let the user drill through the filesystem analogy and find their data using some other criteria.

btilly• 14 years ago

The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.

One of the most widely replicated UX results is that over half of people don't "get" the concept of a nested directory structure. Not even when you try to explain it to them.

Not dumb people either. College graduates. It seems to be a mental block. It is not one you will find among programmers (anyone who can't understand this is unable to become a programmer), but if you're designing for the general population you need to be aware of it.

The result is that any user interface which forces people to be aware of a directory structure is going to confuse the heck out of real people. You may have a directory structure. But to get happy users you need to keep them blissfully unaware of it.

jsz0• 14 years ago

The problem with it is that you are assuming that your users are blithering idiots without any actual work to do.

I think we are assuming there will be more sophisticated organizational systems built on top of this abstracted file system eventually. We are still in the very early days of this transition. The need to logically organize files can be accomplished in many different ways. An OS could have logical organization features based on concepts like projects, collections, etc. At that point you can start doing some fancy stuff. What if two projects overlap in some way? No problem. They can both reference the same files. Maybe my project is going to include 100 image files that someone else on my team is producing. No problem. I will just add their shared collection of images into the project and they will auto-update themselves anytime my team member makes changes. In the long run this is all about consolidating sharing, organization and collaboration.

olivier1664• 14 years ago

I love dumping my stuff and know my mother will take care of it for me^^

scrumper2• 14 years ago

"...I'd estimate [that] 9/10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder."

You pulled that out of your backside; I decided to use real data. My employer has extraordinarily loose security: our main file server has no access restrictions on any user's working directory. So, I am able to get a quick look at the filing practices of just under 200 people. Of these, 15 didn't use their personal folders at all, presumably preferring to store everything on their desktops. Everyone else had at least one level of folders in their directories. Roughly half of the company are developers, the other half are non-technologists, like sales, administrators, and trainers.

I asked my wife (MD of a mid-sized media company with over 500 staff) what her lot did. Every one of the middle managers she directly looks after have complex filing schemes of their own. She recently went through a big process with IT to create a centralised repository for project work so she is intimately familiar with how her team run their workflow. This is not a technology company; these are sales managers, marketers, operations people, creatives and so on.

9/10? No, not at all. 1/10 perhaps.

"...users can't be bothered to come up with hierarchies...folders are an anachronism..."

This is simply untrue. Neither the data nor my personal experience bear that out: My mother, a retired luddite who never used a computer in her working life and someone who has sent precisely six emails in her entire life, has a hierarchy of folders on the first gen Mac Mini I bought her a decade ago.

"...they just want..."

Assumption is incredibly dangerous. Be careful, especially if you are designing things for people to use. Moving away from hard numbers and into psychology, your thinking is simplistic in the extreme. Human beings absolutely love to organise things. Scrapbooking, Pinterest, stamp collecting. Hobbies that are basically just organising stuff. We love categorising the world: genre-ordered record collections, the Dewey decimal system, Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species, Felony Murder 2, Captain-Commander-Lieutenant, Category Theory in mathematics, the Standard Model... People are a lot smarter and a lot more organised than you understand. Have you ever seen a toddler carefully sorting their toys? It's deep inside us.

ethermal2• 14 years ago

Very true, I've been in IT for over 20 years and have worked at sites ranging from 10 users to over 13000 users. I can attest to the flat filing system as the exception not the rule. At my current employer, looking at public folders on network shares the average folder depth is 5 deep. Many have a main repository and then secondary and Tertiary hierarchies using symbolic links to the same contents to help people find what they are looking for.

snprbob86• 14 years ago

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I do want to point out that you're talking about employees of a company that has a shared file server... That people use! I have several family members, that I consider highly intelligent, who work blue colar, manual labor jobs, for which they don't have email addresses, even as they were promoted to more senior and leadership roles. My uncle hates his computer. He loves his iPad. Furthermore, I know several more folks who have business email addresses, some kind of web mail, are not issued company machines, and maybe only check that email once a month. Consider service industries, like restaurants. The number of people that work these sorts of jobs likely outnumber tech savvy office dwellers 10-to-1. You live in a bubble. Most of us here on HN do.

bp_• 14 years ago

I like that your main argument against trees for organizing files is that people use specific applications per file type to organize them... _in trees._ Photos are sorted by year first and album then. Songs are sorted by artist first and album then. People understand trees just fine.

Also, the problem of being unable to put the same thing in more than a place is a) not one fixed by app silos b) part of our daily life while sorting physical objects c) fixed with filesystem links (soft/hard).

Your argument only proves today's mainstream file management programs/save as dialogues/etc. are inadequate. Trees remain the best simplest model to organize files in a filesystem

goblin89• 14 years ago

> The article I'm about to link to, by Oliver Reichenstein, is pretty terrible

Funnily, I liked linked article more (better written, also easier to read). Although I partially agree, partially would argue with both.

I think hierarchy-less approach, properly designed and implemented, would work OK for most users. Folders just look like the most basic and generic way for organizing stuff, which isn't necessarily the best, and probably deserves optimization for particular use cases.

However, take for example cases when computer is used for production—say, DTP or video/photo editing. If you take away the freedom to organize files hierarchically, it would impose certain restrictions on the workflow. The “genericness” could be an advantage for more complex use cases.

gbog5• 14 years ago

That's a refreshing view. I fully agree. I hate it when a music player do not allow me to browse my clean and deep directory. I detest the fact that apparently no Picture manager is letting me to see my 10 years of photos in the hierarchy of my choice, that I implemented patiently in a directory structure.

And to the many comments right here that argue that people have hard time dealing with directories, I have one question: Did you ever work within a normal company (I mean, the kind of company where you have people in suit or tailleur doing ppt and excels)?

I have, and I can tell you that the most stubborn HR assistant will have his or her files almost neatly catalogued in a hierarchy, and most of the time they will be able to find the "2001 report on office expenses" directly from the hierarchy.

Granted, most will not use a clever and consistent naming convention for files, allowing to sort them properly (eg. all files prefixed by year). And that is a problem. A problem that the hierarchy solves properly, by the way.

So, I would bet the Apple/Google "no file" movement is a dead end. Worse, it is a trap. Check who will benefit from this move: Users? No. Advertisers? Maybe. DRM corporations? Certainly...

qxcv2• 14 years ago

> DRM corporations? Certainly...

How so?

gbog5• 14 years ago

Well, if you do not have any mp3 or video files on your hard drive anymore, if all of that is in the cloud, then it will be much easier to enforce copyrights (and censorship, and surveillance, by the same way).

krautsourced• 14 years ago

> I detest the fact that apparently no Picture manager is letting me to see my 10 years of photos in the hierarchy of my choice, that I implemented patiently in a directory structure.

Lightroom does, for example.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I agree insomuch as you can pry my hierarchical file system from my cold dead hands. And indeed I think it is essential for anyone passing a moderate threshold of any kind of professional work using a computer. However, I the OA wrongly dismisses the trouble people have with traditional file system. The iOS model, however limiting, does work better for a large swath of casual users.

rogerchucker4• 14 years ago

Great topic and one that has been bothering me. Can somebody answer the following question - when I have a PDF opened in app-1 in my iOS device and there is an export/share button in that app which allows me to open that PDF in app-2, does that sharing end up creating two copies of my PDF on my device? If yes, then isn't this app-as-a-silo model a little inefficient?

muxxa2• 14 years ago

The giveaway phrase here is:

"... instead of having your own structure, tailor-made for you because you created it in the first place ..."

Non-geeks don't have the time, interest or inclination to catalogue and curate these sorts of structures.

The list that the author gives of everyday items that are easy to use ("cupboards, Tupperware, boxes, closets, pockets, wallets") all have the common property that they are not recursive, and that you can easily figure out their contents at a glance, something that is impossible to garner by looking at an opaque list of directories.

While there are some good points here about the problems of files being siloed in apps on iOs, the directory structure is a ux disaster.

hmmyeah5• 14 years ago

> "Non-geeks don't have the time, interest or inclination to catalogue and curate these sorts of structures."

Define non-geek then. Unless you mean "people who have too few items to need organization", I think that's wrong. I've met plenty of not super bright people who had for example a perfectly organized garage or apartment. I dare say it has nothing to do with geekyness. There's even tidy kids.. they cannot even program a computer, they cannot reach the cookie jar like I can, but they can and do organize the stuff they care about, in ways they care about.

> "The list that the author gives of everyday items that are easy to use ("cupboards, Tupperware, boxes, closets, pockets, wallets") all have the common property that they are not recursive"

What? You can put tupperware into a box, and put that into the cupboard. Usually, this is located in a house which is located in a street, which is in a city. And so on. The levels of nesting, nobody counted them.. but most everybody navigates them just fine.

lovskogen14• 14 years ago

Geeks = super bright people? Nice pat on our backs. I just came to say that you can put tupperware into a box, but I think most of the time, people just put stuff in one box. Your street and city metaphor seems out of place in this discussion.

muxxa2• 14 years ago

> Define non-geek then

I was using 'geeks' in the sense of someone who is interested in computers in their own right, as opposed to the vast majority of people who use computers as a tool to accomplish other things.

I don't mean "people who have too few items to need organization", and I certainly didn't characterize them as "not super bright"; you made that assumption.

> you can put tupperware into a box, and put that into the cupboard... house ... street .. city

Yes, but you cannot fit a cupboard into a tupperware box, with the cupboard containing another 50 tupperware boxes. Your analogy ignores the important difference between real and virtual items, namely that real containers have physicality which makes it trivial to figure out at least an upper bound on what they contain.

Additionally, an opaque cupboard has context which gives it clues as to what it might contain (clothes in a bedroom, plates in the kitchen). A drawer has a volume which means that you don't need to go looking for a beach ball in it. There are tonnes of conventions as to what types of items go in what containers. For a file system, all we've got is a name on an opaque 'box' that might contain N other boxes recursing to M levels.

You need to create the file structure in the first place, spend a lot of time revisiting, organizing and curating it for it to be as familiar to you as the storage in your house. I don't mean to offend anyone if I say that only geeks have the time to do this.

rogerchucker4• 14 years ago

I think computer scientists need data points before making proclamations like "most people don't like folders".

super_mario6• 14 years ago

Most computer scientists are fuming with rage when sociology majors pushing strings at Apple are telling them to hide the filesystem from the users.

kalleboo6• 14 years ago

When I see people struggle with folders, it's these two things:

- System, Application and Settings storage folders that the typical user really shouldn't have to see in the first place

- Predefined directory structures like "My Documents" that the user didn't create themselves. Especially when apps crud things up even more with subdirectories with files the user didn't create themselves and can't edit themselves (on my Mac I have "EyeTV Archive", "Final Cut Pro Documents", "iChats", etc... these should be hidden in Library folders until the user exports them). The Desktop is among these. Storing files on the Desktop shouldn't be possible.

If when new users got a computer, the only storage visible was a completely blank home folder, I think a lot of this confusion would disappear. It's not nesting of folders per-se that's the problem, it's that there's a ton of shit there from the beginning that the user has no idea what it is, where they are right now, and where their document will go. When the user created everything themselves and applications don't save documents go into special folders by default, I think a lot of that confusion is gone.

In this world, users who don't understand folders won't create them, and so they won't be confronted with the complexity. The "app silo" model could be emulated by app open dialogs only showing files created by the app itself by default.

Personally, I hate the app silo model. I like having a folder per project with all the related files in it. If I'm working on a report, I want to be able to quickly get to the text chapters, the graphs, my data sources, etc without jumping between apps so much.

neutronicus2• 14 years ago

> If when new users got a computer, the only storage visible was a completely blank home folder

...you mean the Desktop?

kalleboo6• 14 years ago

No. That's exactly what makes it so confusing. User sees desktop, all is good. They go into Word, save a file. It ends up in "My Documents" by default. Now the user thinks they lost the file, since it's not on the Desktop.

kalleboo6• 14 years ago

Followup: Anyone confused by hierarchical folders is going to be just as confused by a database model with tags and saved searches.

microtonal• 14 years ago

Maybe, but I guess ideally, the user would want to be able to say: "open my 2008 tax report" or "send Jack the photos of my trip to Paris this year". This fits more closely to a Spotlight-like search plus actions, a direction that Apple is clearly moving to.

Sure, things are imperfect now: Spotlight search does not catch everything and Siri often messes up. Coming from hierarchy-oriented interfaces to documents, it sometimes feels like throwing your data in a dark pit, where it is impossible to retrieve it again. But if they can nail this stuff correctly some day, we surely have come a long way!

In some cases it almost works perfectly already. I never put e-mail in IMAP folders anymore, since Mail.app's search functionality allows me to find stuff quicker and more effectively.

lovskogen14• 14 years ago

Why shouldn't storing files on the desktop be possible?

kalleboo6• 14 years ago

The desktop doesn't fit into a hierarchy very well. It feels like it ought to be the "root" of your computer, but it's always really a folder in the user's home directory. In Windows it's even more confusing since they put "My Computer" and the drives under the desktop, which is really in your home folder...

It would work if the desktop WAS your home root, but then you can lose files simply because they're covered up with windows. They could let you open the desktop again in a separate window like current OSes do, but I'm a proponent of the Spatial file manager[0] so I think that would be confusing in other ways. Also some people (me) object to the clutter :)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

jeltz• 14 years ago

Agreed, especially on Windows this is very confusing. So much junk in your home folder by default so it is hard to tell where your things should go. A clean or almost clean home directory would be much preferable.

LinXitoW• 14 years ago

I don't think changing the way we structure our files is that bad an idea, although the iOS version of it isn't really great. Folders are basically a way of grouping files of a similar topic/concern together. Files can belong to many topics/concerns, but they can only belong to one folder. I'd really love it if we evolved the folder concept to a concept of tags, where the organization is very fluid and dynamic.

Example(example folder structures):

* I could put an anime movie file under /Media/Video/Movies/Anime or /Media/Video/Anime/Movies

* Same for an anime tv show: /Media/Video/shows/Anime or /Media/Video/Anime/shows

If i could tag the anime movie as "Movie" and as "Anime", i could just pick and choose which way i want to view it:

* All movies?

* All anime movies?

* All anime?

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Google Docs used to do this. Folders weren't really folders, they were tags, and it was horribly confusing.

jonhendry• 14 years ago

I could see that being confusing.

If something appears in two tag-folders, is it because it has both tags, or because it is two different versions or copies, with different tags?

yaix2• 14 years ago

When GDocs did that, people didn't get it and G switched it to be "one tag per item" aka folders.

jpalomaki2• 14 years ago

Or maybe they realized that implementing Google Drive would be quite challenging with tags instead of folders.

epo3• 14 years ago

The article linked to is a witless rant. The article he is reacting to is actually pretty good.

As is commonly the case with people who don't understand what they are talking about, the author is confusing policy (I want to organise my stuff) and mechanism (use folders and sub-folders). What is undeniable is that we need a coherent way to organise our stuff. What is wrong-headed is assuming that hierarchical directories are the best, or the only, way to do so.

gbog5• 14 years ago

I think the other point of view, the anti-directory one, is well reflected in this review of OSX: http://informationarchitects.net/blog/mountain-lions-new-fil...

The most notable saying is that "As soon as we have more than a handful of notions, or (beware!) more than one hierarchical level of notions, it gets hard for most brains to build a mental model of that information architecture."

Here is my ranty answer:

~~~~

My god. Who the HELL are those guys to be so dismissive of human brain?

I have a kid, he is learning ten words a day, and this little boy is not a genius: It is a normal human being in formation. He is also playing a lot with my old legos, and he is communicating better and better in two very different languages. I can tell you, dear "Information architects" that he can already handle more than one hierarchical level!

I have worked in normal companies before. By that I mean companies were people have meetings, get bored by many slideshows every week, and use excel spreadsheets daily. In this kind of companies, geniuses are not the norm. And all of these people, all of these common "brains" could handle easily "more than one hierarchical level".

So, dear "Information architects", please keep your stinky morgue to yourself.

Human brain is the most wonderful thing that can be observed in the world. Its capacities surpass anything we (human brains) can modelize with our other tools. A kid of 3 years is much better in all what matters than a computer. We, normal human beings, won't let you grow a new generation of lobotomized humans for whom it is "hard" to build a "mental model" with "more than one hierarchical level".

Post-scriptum: After a mandatory proof-reading, I sit there and I wonder: maybe my legitimate anger against your aristocratic hauteur did blind me of a better explanation. The "brain limitation" you are attributing so kindly to "most brains" is just your own problem, maybe. Then your are not as cynical as it seems. But then I repeat: of any of my colleagues, old and young, clever and stupid, ubergeek or almost illiterate, all could handle a fking tree structure for their file. Thanks for considering them (a bit).

epo3• 14 years ago

My God, what is it about this topic? Is there something about geeks that makes them think a mastery of nested folders is a validation of their manhood?

There are other, and probably better, organising principles than hierarchical directories. It is not anti-directory as the original author so witlessly claims but a search for better, easier to understand, alternatives. Something which Apple have repeatedly done, and by so doing made a lot money in the process.

gbog5• 14 years ago

No, my point is that all the office employees I have known did master nested folders. For some assets a hierarchical structure is not ideal, I agree with that, but I don't agree with this "users are geeks or stupid" claim I see flourishing more and more here and there. In reality, users are either very clever or not interested. I have seen once a non geek do incredible tweaking to his Windows box in order to play CS. On the opposite, I know of very clever geeks who can't even fill a sign-up form, or cook eggs, because they aren't interested.

super_mario6• 14 years ago

Trees are so yesterday. I think we should move to cyclic graphs for our filesystems.

yaix2• 14 years ago

> Vendor lock-in

Well, duh! Obviously that's what it is about when "apps" don't want to tell you how they store their data. MS Office has been doing that very successfully for more than 20 years now. And removing the abillity to actually locate the data would make it even easier to tie the user to the app and plattform.

robomartin• 14 years ago

There's a huge difference here between Mom, Dad and Uncle Fester using a computer and professional or business users.

The first set of users can be either lazy or oblivious to the idea of organizing their data --directories or databases, it doesn't matter. It's a pile-o-stuff and they really don't think far beyond that. For this class of users making it super-simple is a good idea. You sort of have to protect them from themselves.

I know doctors who have absolutely no clue as to where their stuff is stored and have zero interest in investing fifteen minutes to learn the basics of directory structures and file management. Zero.

The second set of users, the pro's and business users --to generalize-- are a different story.

Take the case of a company that designs physical products. Each project is likely to live inside a directory structure segregating and organizing areas or work such as: mechanical design, schematic, pcb layout, bill of materials, design calculations, documentation, embedded firmware, FPGA code, cost calculations, marketing materials, packaging design, manufacturing, specifications, etc. In turn, each of these categories will rightly have its own subdirectory structures when and where it makes sense.

The above per-product directory structure is also likely to be completely replicated as product releases and revisions require. Not everything can be handled by Git-type version control systems. In fact, in product design there are very good arguments for complete design duplication during iterations or to mark release (as shipped) configurations. Different subject.

This second use case cannot be served well with the iOS app-centric sand-boxed model. A product directory structure with thousands of files can have a number of applications access these files. There will not be a one-to-one correlation between applications and a lot of the files in the design.

Similar use cases can be found in other businesses where the end-product might not be a physical product design. Research projects, financial reports, publications and other work product is likely to require a number of different file types that may or may not come together to form a single deliverable.

Again, the iOS sand-boxed model fails to support this use case because it forces a per-file-type or per-application separation of files and does not permit or provide the ability to organize disparate file types into projects according to context.

Put another way: If you are Lockheed you don't want the F-16 and F-117 mechanical design files mashed together into one folder simply because the same CAD system is used to open then. You want them to live within their corresponding project stores and within a sensible directory structure that organizes work according to relevant criteria. For example, the wing mechanical design directory might also contain a set of directories with aerodynamics data whereas the mechanical design directory for the seat has not need for such data.

I see that the Windows approach seems to work well for the first type of user. If applications use it correctly (some don't) everything gets dumped into "My Documents" and other predefined folders. Users would occasionally add sub-folders of their own.

The second set of users generally has the presence of mind and knowledge to "roll their own". Using my own patterns as an example, I don't think I own a single computer (Mac or PC) that does not have a separate "Data" drive where projects are stored within their own directory structures and according to their own needs.

There's another twist to this, which is a far less common use case: I happen to run more than one business. There's zero justification for my Photoshop files from business #1 to be stored in the same location as those of business #2 on the same computer. Each business has its own root directory from which to organize the corresponding files.

bornhuetter• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree with this more.

In a corporate environment it would be an absolute nightmare to organise files without a well maintained hierarchical directory structure. Folders often need to contain files that are used in a variety of programs (spreadsheets, text documents, presentations), so trying to tie the directories and files to each application would ruin this system.

It would also be a disaster for sharing files with other people. If someone gives me a usb stick with 1000 badly named files, with 1 level of folders – what do I do? If I dump them in directly with mine, it’s a huge mess. And I can’t nest it inside a folder.

I can see many disadvantages to taking away folders, and can’t think of a single benefit to me.

ehutch796• 14 years ago

>I know doctors who have absolutely no clue as to where their stuff is stored and have zero interest in investing fifteen minutes to learn the basics of directory structures and file management. Zero.

I'm betting this also applies to their physical files.

rnadna• 14 years ago

I wonder if others have scaled back on the "meaningfulness" of file names. I name a lot of my files (and directories) 01, 02, 03, etc (with suffixes according to meaning) and then I have a local README file that lists the contents of each of these.

I find it this scheme handy for scientific work in which the files are often multiple attempts to solve a problem. It saves me from writing file names like "solution" and "solution_method2" and "solution_method2_with_bug_fix" etc. The README format gives me tons of space to write comments (and cross-reference other work), while the filename, incrementing from version to version, is a sort of diary stamp.

This works for directories too. I tend to go only 2 directories deep on a given project. The top level is for the task, e.g. a calculation or a figure for a paper I'm writing, and the second is for a sequence of approaches to that task.

With this scheme, I focus on README files and not names in a directory tree. Colleagues who have tried this have found it weird at first, but then tend to prefer it to the "informative name" scheme they grew up with.

If databases were more convenient, I could imagine doing all my work with "flattened" filenames in a single directory. I think that's what apple are moving toward, but they are thinking of application-specific work, so the application deals with the databases. I prefer the README/filesystem structure because it lets me use tools like grep, etc.

b1daly• 14 years ago

Apple's attempts at making "seamless" user experiences can be frustrating, especially on edge cases. For example, in Garageband instruments are stored in special files down a ways in a directory tree in Application Support. It happens that files get corrupted, but access to the file is so abstracted that the source of the trouble is not apparent, as it is a directory not intended to be accessed by the user. It's an attempt to hide complexity from the user but it makes it hard to trouble-shoot, or to perform actions outside of the expected.

The area that does boggle my mind in terms of a flat structure are complex multi-media authoring environments. Where different files and types are used to assemble a larger work.

My main principle as an audio engineer is that I have to know exactly where each file in the project lives in the FS. If I'm not sure, the scenarios in which projects, or parts of projects get lost happen more frequently.

Not to mention that a given project uses many files of different types, and can have 10s or 100s of thousands of files. Automatic file management seems like a recipe for disaster, especially as it won't work perfectly.

I don't get it.

lovskogen14• 14 years ago

There seems to be alot of the comments here pointing out that the users are dumb, or they "just have to learn" – really? Aren't we the ones that should design solutions that are easy to understand, and easy to use?

cabirum• 14 years ago

It's a single basic thing users absolutely must learn. It's a foundation designers use to build their solutions upon. Every tool requires some prior knowledge to use it. You cannot use a spoon until you learned how to use it.

Hierarchical structures are natural to humans. Books with volumes and chapters, organizational structures, administrative hierarchies, etc, etc.

I defy the idea of people who "don't get" directory structure. It.. just cannot be real.

andyjohnson0• 14 years ago

To me, this is about choice.

If a computer has a file system that is accessible to the user and supports files and hierarchical directories, then users can choose to use it or not. If they want to use directory hierarchies then they can. Or if they want to store all their files in one place and rely on applications to present filtered views or search (not necessarily even in terms of files) then they can.

If the file system is not accessible or doesn't support hierarchical directories then you have no choice. This is not an option that interests me.

jpalomaki2• 14 years ago

If OS vendor would like to switch to using metadata or tags to organize documents, allowing just two level directory structure could be the first step.

Documents in root would end up having no tags at all and the folder name would be used as the tag for those stored in folders. Obviously you could also do this with complex directory structures, but then the tags would become quite long.

Metadata/tag based systems don't necessary exclude the complex folder structures as we have seen but having both can make things complicated.

abenga• 14 years ago

I'm all for any easier file organization system as long as it's portable between systems, allows a large number of files to be locatable and usable immediately after being plugged into a system (i.e. without a lengthy indexing process), and doesn't make it difficult to share files between users in a network (e.g. a Samba set-up in an office). I don't know if there can be any such system that doesn't become as "complex" as the current folders-in-folders way of doing things. Most of the systems I've seen assume that I only access the files from this device and I'd never need to copy them to external storage or share them with another user not necessarily using the same kind of system as I do.

Maybe a hybrid system, like the one being done in GNOME, where you have the traditional underlying file system present, and a separate indexing program (GNOME documents) that enables searching by content, context, date modified, etc would be best.

powertower• 14 years ago

> I have honestly never seen a single person have any issues with directories, nested or no...

This is completely off. I've seen people not being able to "get" the concept of folders and files even after months of demonstrations... They simply forget, don't understand, can't use. Especially in the context of drives, devices, memory cards, etc.

And those people are large in numbers, the non-computer crowd. Probably at least 30% of the general population.

ehutch796• 14 years ago

i would like to see the anti-directory people put forth a basic cms that works this way. everything is tagged, no folders. or however they're saying they want it to work.

then give this to an enterprise. hell PAY them to use it. see what the results are.

since you're all ui/ux experts 'they're using it wrong' will be an unacceptable response to anything that happens.

kraemate• 14 years ago

I dont want applications to be file-managers and hiding where my files really are. Files+directories is a very intuitive, powerful, and low-abstraction concept --- directories and files correspond directly to inodes. Thus the file-system and users' view of files is the same. Tagging etc can easily be accomplished by using extended attributes (like in the BeOS Filesystem), but apparently no one wants to use extended attributes.

blt• 14 years ago

I come across a great counter-example to directory structures every day. I make 32-bit, 64-bit, debug, and release builds of my product. How do I organize them in a tree? Which distinction is "higher-level"?

awakeasleep• 14 years ago

I had to stop reading at "I've never met a user who has trouble navigating nested directories."

My experience tells me he is in the 'tech guy' bubble. As someone who volunteered helping city kids use computers, had a 'business' fixing people's computers, and has a dad who teaches a free computer class at a library, and has worked tech support, I say with some confidence that the silent majority of people don't understand folders at all.

You have to be a tech savvy, middle to upper middle class person with relatively high motivation before you stand a chance of understanding folder structure. Exceptions abound, of course, but then again most 9-5 working, intelligent people struggle to organize their data in folders even though they fit my demographic of people with a chance to understand.

zcvosdfdgj• 14 years ago

I stopped reading at the same point. There are people confused by everything about computers.. if he hasn't met one confused about folders, then he doesn't have the experience to write his article.

crazygringo2• 14 years ago

This all boils down to several salient points:

1) Nobody, not even 90-year-old computer newbies, has trouble understanding hierarchical folders. There could not be a more natural concept of organization. It corresponds to a box inside a storage box inside a closet inside a room inside a house inside a neighborhood, etc. It's just every level is called a folder. Saying that "x" group of people "can't understand" that is just insulting to them, frankly.

2) People who use a flat directory to save 1000's of invoices on a computer which is only used for that, who do not understand folders -- that's fine. This doesn't prove folders are non-intuitive. They just don't need to understand folders, because the job doesn't require folders. The moment their job does, someone can explain it to them, and they will get it, the same way they get that paperclips go in the box on the shelf in the closet.

3) The original Mac OS (say, up to System 6) did a great job of making folders understandable. They were physical icons, physical window locations, they were easy to use. The Open/Save dialogs could be a bit confusing, and still are -- there's definitely room for improvement there.

4) Modern OS's do a terrible job at making folders understandable, because there are drive directories, often hidden, and then multiple user folders, and their Documents directories, and then things outside their Documents directories (like Desktop, Downloads, etc.), and fake folders that show the content of multiple other folders, etc.

5) So people are rightly claiming that folders are a mess and confusing. Yes they are, on modern OS's. But the problem is not with the concept of folders, it's with their back-assward modern implementations. So don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and claim that folders are bad. Instead, the solution is:

6) Modern OS's and apps: stop trying to organize our damned files for us! Stop auto-creating "Downloads" and "My Pictures" and "My Skype Photos" and "My Virtual Machines" directories. Just stop it! Instead, give each user their own home directory, have it be empty on a new computer, have every application open/save things in it by default (including downloads), and let the user organize things gradually as they see fit. And don't let anyone but a power user ever get outside of this directory.

(And ideally, stop allowing users to put documents on their desktop -- it just confuses things and nobody has ever come up with an intuitive way to integrate that with the concept of user folders (my desktop is inside my user folder, what?). Documents on a desktop is an outgrown metaphor that just nobody seems to have the courage to jettison.)

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

4) Modern OS's do a terrible job at making folders understandable, because there are drive directories, often hidden, and then multiple user folders, and their Documents directories, and then things outside their Documents directories (like Desktop, Downloads, etc.), and fake folders that show the content of multiple other folders, etc.

This is a particularly salient point -- in further particular:

fake folders that show the content of multiple other folders

I'll add to that, widgets that are not intuitive and/or don't clearly express the hierarchy.

My parents understand organization just fine. But then they encounter this interface that keeps breaking the basic rules and UI of same. They stop trusting the machine and themselves to interpret what it is presenting and doing.

This is bad UI.

ThomPete13• 14 years ago

There is nothing that is intuitive unless it's learned.

ThomPete13• 14 years ago

You are missing the point here.

Just because you understand something in real life does not by any metrics mean that you understand it on a computer.

You grew up with computers for you it's secondary but you learned it.

Someone who have never used computers before do not understand the metaphor.

So no it's not insulting them.

2) Folders are non-intuitive if they aren't learned. There is no natural transfer of understanding between putting documents in a folder physically and then using your moves to drag some icons around. You assume there is, but there isn't, it has to be learned.

5) What people complain about is that it's not the web. They just want to click a link that takes them to where they want to be taken. Of course folders are a mess and confusing cause most data is a mess an confusing.

6) I am pretty sure that it actually works.

I think your understanding of how normal users think is probably as inaccurate as it could probably be.

diminoten2• 14 years ago

Okay so let's just stop with the "I'm right you're wrong!" stuff. I think what we need to do here is some research. Are those who classify themselves as "computer illiterate" more or less capable of understanding the concept of directories than those who are more technically inclined?

Until we have some real research into this, we're just making things up, and that's A Bad Thing.

drivebyacct23• 14 years ago

>Folders are non-intuitive if they aren't learned

This is the second time you've used the word intuitive. I'm not sure if you don't understand what it means or if you just misspoke twice.

Something is intuitive if it doesn't need to be taught/learned.

dredmorbius7• 14 years ago

Your comment on #5 is interesting: local storage folders/directories don't correspond to the WWW experience.

Locally, I've got to dig through directories to find stuff. I've got some search tools, but they're generally primitive and/or hit-or-miss. I almost exclusively use the command line, not graphical file browsers (which I find exceptionally tedious).

On the WWW, I generally find stuff through a search engine which, with the benefit of some very clever back-end heuristics, does a really good job of turning up the right stuff. Or I might use my local bookmarks collection, though that again uses a folder metaphor and is a bit tedious to use.

But ... I use the Vimperator Firefox plugin, which makes my browser a lot more like a command line. So when I want to open a web page, I'll almost always switch to command mode and start typing a part of the URL or description of the site ... and Vimperator starts searching through my history and bookmarks for a set of likely matches, which I then tab to and hit <enter>. (Granted, some "superbar" navigation works similarly, though I find Vimperator's operation superior).

My experience is that directories work where you're going to put a certain level of thought into how you want to organize content. But heaps and search tools work better where you've got a lot of diverse content and want to be able to dig into it periodically.

dredmorbius7• 14 years ago

Your #4 and #6 are pretty spot on in my experience (which is mostly Linux / Unix systems, though I've certainly used others extensively).

Having multiple paths to the same location is confusing, especially when the rationale isn't made apparent to users.

The Windows drive-lettering mode is complete pants and should have died 20 years ago. Yes, there's an alternate scheme, but it's much more verbose, not widely advertised, and if not worse, roughly as bad.

Linux/Unix have terse directory names, but a very, very, very stable naming schema, with a lot of history behind them. Once learned, that's knowledge and behavior you can bank on.

The proliferation of "My ..." directories under user's home directories, the odd distinction between user home and "Desktop", and a slew of other things, really speaks to a horrible mash of concepts which no one (or no empowered team) ever sat down to think through rationally. I've always found the "My ..." meme to beneedlessly verbose and highly condescending (where similar conventions are used on Linux, the "My " is virtually always dropped, thank you unknown benefactors). The use of dotfiles rather than a dedicated $HOME/etc/ directory means that there's a proliferation of magic files and directories off of a user's home direcotry which are significant ... yet hard to distinguish from other folders. As a WindowMaker fan, the presence of a non-dotfile "GNUstep/" directory off my home dir has long been a mild annoyance.

What's also lacking in general computer training / mentoring are suggestions on how to best organize a user's directory space. There's a fascination with desktop screenshots, but I'd largely find an archive of 3-4 level directory trees interesting. How people organize their work has a lot to say about how they do their work.

alter8• 14 years ago

> (And ideally, stop allowing users to put documents on their desktop -- it just confuses things and nobody has ever come up with an intuitive way to integrate that with the concept of user folders (my desktop is inside my user folder, what?). Documents on a desktop is an outgrown metaphor that just nobody seems to have the courage to jettison.)

Why not make the desktop the home folder, so my files are quick to access? Maybe one could even create a second Desktop for shortcuts and user actions.

jack-r-abbit• 14 years ago

So... Apple doesn't want people to write code on their OS anymore? I can't think of many languages that would not suffer from a lack of folders. I don't care about all the other crap being discussed. There will always be people that have a hard time with XYZ.

postfuturist• 14 years ago

The article is a bit of a rant, but it resonates deeply with me. The single-level of nesting is obnoxious. The spotify app allows a flat list of playlists--just the one level of nesting. Now that I've got a couple hundred albums in there, it has basically become useless, and I just have to search to find everything, which is _not_ what I want to do.

Hierarchical structures are how we see the world. Tagging and search is not sufficient. File systems give us the illusion of a "place" that a file lives. A single place. Like my socks are in a drawer in my closet, they are always there. A given music file is always in /home/steve/Music/<artist>/<album>/track.foo. That's where it lives. I can find it, even if I have 10,000 albums. My tax documents are in /home/steve/Documents/personal/taxes/2011/ . They exist there. I can auto-backup /home/steve/Documents and I know that those documents are safely backed up. I won't lose those things.

ThomPete13• 14 years ago

Intuition is learned.

Something is intuitive not because it’s universally understood but because we have learned the meaning of it from a holistic point of view. This requires lots and lots of experience and, for that matter, trial and error.

Metaphors are only meaningful in retrospect.

Don’t count on the physical-looking button to be intuitive just because it’s a metaphor from real life. Once you tell someone what a specific element means, they will most probably understand it, but not because of the metaphor itself.

There are no Bablefish in UX

Designing products and services is like speaking French. Not everyone understands it. Comprenez-vous? The noob might pick up a word here and there, but they aren’t, by any metrics, comfortable with participating in the conversation.

This all leads to the following conclusion:

Intuitive interaction is for experts, not for noobs Understanding something intuitively really means that you understand it holistically. If you understand it holistically, you can fill in the gaps. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make your design intuitive or improve on it—not at all. Just understand that you are doing it for the natives. not for the noobs.

http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-com...

it• 14 years ago

It's not so much that folders are counter-intuitive. The problem with them is that they impose a single, arbitrary structure on files that could be organized in many different ways. For example, you could have folders like AllMyImages/ or AllMyCatImages/ or CatImagesJuly2012/ but there's no way to anticipate what will be the most useful directory structure for all future situations. It would be more flexible and useful to have indexes over the files that let you dynamically organize your content according to attributes such as contains-cats, date, is-image, author, etc.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

One of the many reasons to hate Apple. I don't understand why supposed geeks can get behind a company that willfully puts draconian protections to keep you from using a computer like a computer. No USB port? No useable FILE SYSTEM? Emailing files is a pathetic hack for a poorly designed device. And "simplicity" is not a saving grace, there is NO REASON to not allow this sort of functionality except to force everyone to use horrible iTunes. People can defend Apple all they want, but no one can give me a valid user-centric reason for those decisions.

gizmo6864• 14 years ago

I think android has the approach to filesystems write. Each app has there own dedicated folder for internal usage and is hidden from the user (actually, the user cannot access it at all unless the specific app provides a method because of sandboxing, but that is a different issue). There is also a file structure where apps can read and write any data that the user might want to share between apps, devices. By convention, the files are organized either by type (image) or by app, however when the user wants to move them, or open them with a different program, this option is left available.

What's with this anti-directory structure movement?

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