Re: [Usability] Re: My humble experience about file managementthrough applications(was: [Yet Another] New File Chooser Design)

[Walter Bamberger <Walter Bamberger myTUM de>]

Hey Julien, it's nice to talk with you :-).

I guess I've found one basic difference between our view on this topic:

Julien Olivier schrieb:
> unexperienced users have to learn this mental model because, for a
> reason I ignore, the other mental model seems more natural to them.
I think about the reason, why new users use this model. It's because I 
can't find something in real world from which these users deduce this 
model. I found the following:

1) Our central control environment is the START-/program-menu. No 
documents, no music. Just applications. It's obvious that one will start 
with Word.

2) If you create / change a file within an application one gets no 
feedback that shows the object that has been changed. The user would 
need to see what's happening with the file, e.g. in a spatial Nautilus 
window (that is visible) a icon for this file should appear or change 
its appearance.

3) The user sees many files and directories he doesn't know and doesn't 
understand. Again there's no corespondance between his documents and the 
files on the computer. He needs a view on his work / documents and not 
on the system he doesn't understand anyway.

I will develop a scenario where these problems should mostly be avoided. 
I haven't thought very much about it, so it might not be best. It's just 
to illustrate my thoughts.



But now some points, why I think we should tend to avoid the application 
centric model:

1) One woman in our company does often have a fearful feeling when she 
is doing something new in the area of file handling, like inserting a 
picture in word, copying a file on a diskette, renaming a file, ... I 
can observe these in a more light variation with other users that have a 
application oriented mental model. Since they don't see where their work 
is and what is happening with their work, they don't trust the computer. 
I guess this is mostly because this model doesn't support these actions 
very well.

2) Sharing data is harder to realize with this model. Since the user 
thinks something like "my documents are in word" it's hard to imagine 
how to share it (you would need to send Word :-) ).

This is not something fantasy like. That's what I experienced. My 
conclusion is that this model doesn't scale well for bigger problems you 
want to solve with your computer. However, people want to do more and 
more with their computer. We should try to support them.



Now it's time to show where I totally agree with you:

As long as we have the application oriented model in our desktop 
environment (and I think we have it right now), we should go with your 
naming proposal (my documents, my picture, ...). This is a good improvement.

But we should also think about solution that help the user to get a 
"better" mental model. You call it "database-oriented" and that's OK. 
For me however, the file system is nothing different from a database. 
There are many forms of databases outside (even within the sever based 
SQL database management systems), and the file system is just another 
variation. There's no reason why it couldn't store other meta data than 
Archiv-bits, ACLs, uid, ... We just have to think in a different way on 
it. That's why I like your suggestion: It lets you think about search 
elements in the open dialog which is absolutely helpful.

So lets draw a simple example how things could be done (with a file 
system or another specialized database or whatever ...):

Most important is that the user get's better feedback on his files and 
to hide all other files.

One possible solution would be to let his desktop be equal to "My files" 
or %HOME% (but without the hidden configuration files). He may only see 
his self made data containers (= file or something like that in a 
database). When he creates or changes a file in an application he gets 
feedback through an appearing icon or a blinking icon (for this the 
application window shouldn't hide the whole desktop). The file icon 
should be just an icon but something with content like that you see when 
you zoom in Nautilus (the desktop is quite large, so this should work). 
 However, some time (when the user creates many files) the data will be 
in a folder. In this case the folder icon should blink and it should 
also represent the count of files in it, to give the user feedback by 
growing, ... (almost all real world containers grow with the count of 
parts in it). Then you could have a task menu on the desktop (like in 
the Explorer of Windows XP) where you could create a new document, ...
And you should be able to easily search in your data pool (full text 
index).

You can think of many more. I guess you know what I mean.

Unfortunately this mail got a little bit long. I hope it wasn't too bad.

Thanks,



Walter