Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Chapter 25 Hierarchies, Space, Time, and How We Think About the World

When computers allow people to organize their data, they often allow people to organize that data into hierarchies. The file system on your PC is the most obvious example of this.

Hierarchies work well for a lot of things. People are used to hierarchies, since they encounter hierarchies all the time. Families are hierarchies of people (the “family tree”). We look at animals and see that individual species are related to each other in an evolutionary hierarchy. Stores arrange ...