Eliminating the hierarchy: GNOME Do and Google

Posted by on 7 September 2009 22:51 Leave a comment (4) Go to comments

This week I became acquainted with two applications: GNOME Do and Google Chrome.

GNOME Do is a program similar in concept to the Mac Spotlight. Although not quite as simple as Spotlight, it still allows you to find files, launch programs, and even search Gmail contacts.

GNOME Do and Spotlight both illustrate a concept Alan Cooper addresses in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. (See my recent post on this book.) Cooper suggests how incredibly confusing hierarchial filesystems can be to users (see, e.g., pp. 9-11). Humans don’t think of file storage in a hierarchial way. When you’re writing something on a pad of paper, you might tear the sheet off and leave it on your desk. Or you might put it in your file drawer. That physical drawer has an advantage over a computer’s filesystem–it is much easier to see and comprehend the whole thing at once. You open the drawer and see all the folders inside it all together.

Now imagine your computer’s filesystem. You just wrote something on your virtual pad of paper. You “tear off” the page and want to put it somewhere. You click Save As…, and it opens to your usual My Documents folder. You put the file there and forget about it.

That isn’t so hard to deal with until you have to dig into the hierarchy of your hard drive. Imagine that you want to locate a file you worked on six months ago. It was a poster for the company barbeque you had in the spring, and you need it again. But where in the world did you put it? How are you going to find it now?

You could start clicking through all the folders on the hard drive until you find it. Or you could use a tool that eliminates the need to comprehend the hierarchial file structure in the first place, such as GNOME Do or Spotlight. Or the Windows search, if that’s the best you’ve got….

Those programs will let you search the file name or (more understandable for a human user) the full text of the file. Once it finds possibilities, you’ll still probably have to wade through a disorganized list to find the actual file. But at least you didn’t have to click through a hundred folders to get to it.

Google does a good job of implementing non-hierarchial file systems in their web apps, such as Gmail and Docs. You simply have lists of things, which you can further organize them with labels (and even use the labels as a sort of file-folder system if you really want to). And full-text searching is a standard, simple necessity.

Google Chrome also does an excellent job eliminating the hierarchy from the web browser: it has very few menus; your address bar, history, and web searching are all in the same box; you open a new tab and see a list of your most frequently-visited sites. No searching through menus of bookmarks or a confusing history pane. Just type in a keyword and it finds it for you.

After all, the computer knows where everything is anyway. Why not make it find things for you?

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  • http://rossadamson.com Ross Adamson

    I like the idea of being able to search for things in a simple way but I also think that hierarchies are sometimes important ideas. For example, I have files that belong to different classes I’m taking in school and I want those class files to be “under” the class they belong to. I also have sets of classes that I want to “belong to” different semesters. This seems like a hierarchy to me but maybe there is a better, more simpler way to associate the relationships between files.

  • http://instancevariable.wordpress.com/ Steven

    I see Google Docs (and Gmail) as a good solution for this. For example with Docs, you can specify labels for all your documents. This way, you can see them in a hierarchial file structure if you want, or you can view them in just a list, with those labels listed next to them.

    I actually just read this morning in Inmates about a concept called monocline grouping (pp. 145-46). Basically, the concept is that you have a linear representation of the data, with attributes (such as a class name or a genre of music, etc.) listed next to the individual files. This eliminates the need to force each one into a single category and instead presents that categorizing information as a useful, related tag. You can then use the tag to take advantage of sorting and searching capabilities without being required to have a pre-existing knowledge of the directory structure. And interesting concept.

  • http://bethings.provoplatinum.com bryant-man

    Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding how the terms are being used, but I think humans actually do think in terms of hierarchal organization.

    In your example of how a normal person files away their pen-on-paper note, they still use a hierarchy: the file can go on the desk, in a drawer (in the desk) or in a file (in the drawer in the desk). I think there might be a difference in that the physical desk hierarchy has different names for each depth of the hierarchy. (And maybe that’s what a monocline hierarchy is? I didn’t find a lot of search results on that term to explain it.) The computer hierarchy might be confusing because it basically allows infinite depth of all a single type: folder. The organization isn’t conceptually different, but it is presented with a different naming convention that might not be as easy to get, especially when it could be very deep. Infinity is always confusing.

    I can definitely see how tag-based organization is an alternative to the hierarchal organization, but I’m not sure it’s what is intuitive to us, and it has its own limitations. It’s advantage is obviously that you can have multiple tags assigned to the same file. It’s hard to say whether that would be intuitive to us outside of computers because physical files can’t be placed in multiple places. It does potentially make it easier to find something later because you don’t have to remember every part of where you put the file. The downside is that you’ve lost some of the information that the hierarchy gives you. The hierarchy tells how the different levels are related to each other, not just how the files are related to their parent. Imagine if zoology were organized by tags instead of in a hierarchy as it is. You might be more able to pick a tag to go with any particular animal or to find the tag where that animal should go, but you’d have lost the information about the similarity and dissimilarity of the classifications.

    I hope I’m not too up in the clouds, but I don’t think there’s really an end-all paradigm for organizing ideas. Different paradigms have their ups and downs. There are things that can make it easier to work with different paradigms, though.

    Searching, then, isn’t really a paradigm that’s more like how we thing and how we organize things outside of computers. Searching doesn’t solve the problem of the hierarchy, it solves the problem of our limited memory. No matter how we filed things we’d forget some part of it. Searching allows us to find what we want even if we don’t remember anything but pieces of it. Undoubtedly that’s powerful, and that’s something that computers have brought us to help us keep track of ideas, even if it’s not something that is more like the way we innately think outside of computers.

    Also, back to the example of the physical note that we file away in our desk, it isn’t really the paradigm that made it easy to open the drawer and find your file among all of the others in there. Rather, it’s that you can look at a group of physical papers and see parts of them all at once, and visually tell which one looks like the one you’re looking for. The computer equivalent of that would be a preview (or thumbnails?) of a folder so that you can see at a glance if the file you want is in there.

  • http://instancevariable.wordpress.com/ Steven

    I must say I have to agree with you, bryant-man. The idea of a hierarchy of organization existed long before the computer. You have a good point that we actually do function that way. Science, your file drawer, and even society wouldn’t really work without hierarchy.

    I like the distinction you draw between the file drawer and a computer’s file folder: you can see different colors or sizes of paper, etc. just by looking at the file drawer, without necessarily having to pull out each one to look at it. Windows Vista has such a “thumbnail” feature at the moment. When you look at a folder, it shows small thumbnails of a few of the files within it. That approaches the physical concept you mentioned, although it would be impractical to show everything in the folder on a preview.

    Perhaps a better statement for me to make is that in some applications it is better to have a non-hierarchial structure for locating information (it works very well for email, for example), but it will never be an ultimate solution for everything. Hierarchial structures are simply the way of life, whether in the real world or on the computer.