RE: Column View

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

Calum wrote:
> > I'd love to hear about some user studies. If Apple did them then I 
> > hope there is some information about them out there. Personally, I 
> > don't believe that Apple do user studies anymore, or they don't do 
> > them like they used to.
> 
> About ten years back when I was working on a styleguide for 
> Reuters, we did a study of trees v. column views for 
> navigating hierarchical geographic information 
> (continent->country->city, more or less).
> 
> Our target audience (stock traders and fund managers) found 
> the browsers easier to use, but we only tested hierarchies 
> that were three or four levels deep (hence no horizontal 
> scrolling), since that's all they ever had to deal with.  
> Unfortunately I've long since lost contact with any report we 
> wrote about it though. It's probably also true that tree 
> controls were fairly novel in those days compared to flat 
> lists, regular computer users will likely have had much more 
> exposure to trees nowadays, although they're not inherently 
> any easier to use than they were in those days.

In case it's interesting, I remembered the other thing that confused me - I
didn't see the connection between the selected item in one column and the
consequent extra columns to the right of it. I was particularly confused
when everything seemed to change and shift around completely when I selected
a different item in one of the columns in the middle. I might have figured
it out more quickly if I had been familiar with the default MacOS X file
structure.

For me, the connection is clearer in a tree because the child folders are
under the parent.

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net