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 ...
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