When I see people struggle with folders, it's these two things:
- System, Application and Settings storage folders that the typical user really shouldn't have to see in the first place
- Predefined directory structures like "My Documents" that the user didn't create themselves. Especially when apps crud things up even more with subdirectories with files the user didn't create themselves and can't edit themselves (on my Mac I have "EyeTV Archive", "Final Cut Pro Documents", "iChats", etc... these should be hidden in Library folders until the user exports them). The Desktop is among these. Storing files on the Desktop shouldn't be possible.
If when new users got a computer, the only storage visible was a completely blank home folder, I think a lot of this confusion would disappear. It's not nesting of folders per-se that's the problem, it's that there's a ton of shit there from the beginning that the user has no idea what it is, where they are right now, and where their document will go. When the user created everything themselves and applications don't save documents go into special folders by default, I think a lot of that confusion is gone.
In this world, users who don't understand folders won't create them, and so they won't be confronted with the complexity. The "app silo" model could be emulated by app open dialogs only showing files created by the app itself by default.
Personally, I hate the app silo model. I like having a folder per project with all the related files in it. If I'm working on a report, I want to be able to quickly get to the text chapters, the graphs, my data sources, etc without jumping between apps so much.
Agreed, especially on Windows this is very confusing. So much junk in your home folder by default so it is hard to tell where your things should go. A clean or almost clean home directory would be much preferable.
Maybe, but I guess ideally, the user would want to be able to say: "open my 2008 tax report" or "send Jack the photos of my trip to Paris this year". This fits more closely to a Spotlight-like search plus actions, a direction that Apple is clearly moving to.
Sure, things are imperfect now: Spotlight search does not catch everything and Siri often messes up. Coming from hierarchy-oriented interfaces to documents, it sometimes feels like throwing your data in a dark pit, where it is impossible to retrieve it again. But if they can nail this stuff correctly some day, we surely have come a long way!
In some cases it almost works perfectly already. I never put e-mail in IMAP folders anymore, since Mail.app's search functionality allows me to find stuff quicker and more effectively.
I agree that good search is essential and helps a lot with not needing to organize stuff anymore. Making good sense of automatic metadata (with photos, stuff like geotagging and iPhoto's Faces) will help even more.
But there's still often a need to browse, and I haven't seen many successful implementations of tags yet, so I'm still skeptical that it's much more intuitive than folder. I know Gmail does it well, but I rarely use their web app, and not many email clients support it. Meanwhile I've never seen anyone use tags in, for instance iPhoto.
The desktop doesn't fit into a hierarchy very well. It feels like it ought to be the "root" of your computer, but it's always really a folder in the user's home directory. In Windows it's even more confusing since they put "My Computer" and the drives under the desktop, which is really in your home folder...
It would work if the desktop WAS your home root, but then you can lose files simply because they're covered up with windows. They could let you open the desktop again in a separate window like current OSes do, but I'm a proponent of the Spatial file manager[0] so I think that would be confusing in other ways. Also some people (me) object to the clutter :)
Lose in the sense where the user comes to me and says "I lost my file!" and I move the window aside and there it is. The same way people "lose" their files by saving them in the wrong folder.
No. That's exactly what makes it so confusing. User sees desktop, all is good. They go into Word, save a file. It ends up in "My Documents" by default. Now the user thinks they lost the file, since it's not on the Desktop.
- System, Application and Settings storage folders that the typical user really shouldn't have to see in the first place
- Predefined directory structures like "My Documents" that the user didn't create themselves. Especially when apps crud things up even more with subdirectories with files the user didn't create themselves and can't edit themselves (on my Mac I have "EyeTV Archive", "Final Cut Pro Documents", "iChats", etc... these should be hidden in Library folders until the user exports them). The Desktop is among these. Storing files on the Desktop shouldn't be possible.
If when new users got a computer, the only storage visible was a completely blank home folder, I think a lot of this confusion would disappear. It's not nesting of folders per-se that's the problem, it's that there's a ton of shit there from the beginning that the user has no idea what it is, where they are right now, and where their document will go. When the user created everything themselves and applications don't save documents go into special folders by default, I think a lot of that confusion is gone.
In this world, users who don't understand folders won't create them, and so they won't be confronted with the complexity. The "app silo" model could be emulated by app open dialogs only showing files created by the app itself by default.
Personally, I hate the app silo model. I like having a folder per project with all the related files in it. If I'm working on a report, I want to be able to quickly get to the text chapters, the graphs, my data sources, etc without jumping between apps so much.