Chao wrote

Hi Sheila & Mimi,

Here's a pretty interesting article from someone who actually led the Exchange development team, basically admitting that they made a mistake to organize information around folders and hierarchies!

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/02/the_flattening__1.html

I still think that folders are great for organizing a small number of items (< 1000), and disagree that increase in computer power is what doomed hierarchies, it's increase in information that we now handle on the computer.

chao

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I think this speaks to what we talked about yesterday...trees are good as personal organization schemes (as opposed to shared, collaborative taxonomies -- ie. the wiki is a shared taxonomy that no one can navigate, especially because SOME people simply create all of of their pages off the top node. Mostly shared taxonomies highlight all of the problems of human communications. People "say" very similar things but "mean" completely different things)...

Rashmi, the IA expert we worked with at the sprint talked about trees being necessary for giving users a sense of place, orienting them in a way that semi-latti and faceted classifications systems fail to do...

HOWEVER, I'm wondering if that's mostly a result of poor or simply nascent UI design for faceted systems...As in, once we move to more visual presentations of data, I don't see why webs of information can't be presented in ways that are just as easy to comprehend as trees...easy to comprehend AND still easy to understand (ie. scalable) once you get beyond 100 items.

The other thing that occurred to me last night was that Gen Y or the baby boomer babies don't really handle "Files and Folders"...It's sort of ironic that just while computers cling desperately to the folder metaphor, folders in the real, physical world have virtually disappeared. I don't even have folders in my "File cabinet". Just a spare laptop.

I think it's a sign that we should maybe move on to a different mental model... :o)