Re: [Usability] spatial nautilus concerns, revisited

["Diego Moya (a.k.a. TuringTest)" <turingt gmail com>]

On 13/05/05, Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com> wrote:
> On 5/12/05, Steve Hall <digitect mindspring com> wrote:
> Imagine you'd have access to a robotic filing clerk, who can serve you
> every document you are looking for in a second (after receiving the
> order). Would you throw away your desktop because of this? Most likely
> you'd keep the documents you are currently working on around, because
> they are still faster to access if you can just grab them. This scales
> to the point until your desktop overflows, then you'll want to put
> some of this stuff back into the archive, knowing that your bionic
> friend will take care of the rest.

Bingo!  Associative retrieval tools aren't meant to replace spatial
positioning, but complement it. They are used at different places to
access information in different contexts. Spatial navigation is good
for retrieving stuff for which you "remember exactly where you put
it". This is specially true for recent information, or automatically
ordered information (for example a chronologically ordered view a la
Microsoft "Stuff I've Seen").  But it's very bad for searching
something that you don't remember where was placed, only the content
it had and what you where doing when using it. For that, search is
much better.


> The only scenario under which spatial folders would become totally
> obsolete would be a scenario where documents can't have a physical
> location anymore.

Not necessarily.  There are other kinds of spatial paradigms aside
from folders. The Zoomworld of Jef Raskin is an infinite, non
hierarchical plane of information (kind of an infinite desktop), where
more information is revealed when you "zoom" near to the objects.
Under that paradigm the "recursive" folders would not be the best
solution - containers like "piles" (stacks) and "boxes" would make far
more sense.

Zooming User Interface:
http://www.relevare.com/site/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_User_Interface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Environment#Zoomworld


Max OS X piles:
http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/stacks.html