Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

A Better Hierarchical System

In some cases, it is simply not possible to avoid hierarchical systems. If you feel that you need to go with a hierarchy, here are a few ideas that should help you make this system as usable as possible.

Restrict Depth

If you give people just a little bit of rope, they’ll have a harder time using it to hang themselves. If you give people the ability to create only shallow hierarchies, they probably won’t get lost in them. One example of such a system is the photo-sharing site Picasa, which allows its users to sort their pictures into albums but doesn’t let them put one album into another album. An album contains a number of pictures, and that’s it. It’s unlikely that people will lose their albums, since they can’t ...