Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

User-Generated Hierarchies

Humans are not good at organizing arbitrary things into a hierarchy and then later remembering where exactly they sorted a specific thing. For example, Mark Shuttleworth^[104] points to the hierarchical file system as a main source of usability issues in Ubuntu, saying, “People save an attachment they receive in email, and an hour later have no idea where to find it.”^[105] Similarly, in a paper called “Improving the Usability of the Hierarchical File System,”^[106] author Gary Marsden writes:

Anyone who has studied how application users store files realizes that the file system is quite a large barrier to all but the most advanced users.

In their paper “Hierarchical File Systems are Dead,” Margo Seltzer and Nicholas Murphy ...