unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 14:51, femorandeira <femorandeira@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:37:12 +0100, "frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <
> frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> yeah, you're absolutely correct. The tools have improved a lot, but
>> none of the technologies has been installed into the default
>> distribution's UI in a generative place.
>> The first change we surely need to advance the semantic abilities of
>> our DEs is to add a tagging system to the "Save as.." dialog window.
>>
>
> Is it a problem with the tools, or is it something about how people think?
>
> There are great differences between:
>  - navigating step by step to a location and being required to "teleport"
> yourself there
>  - recognizing your document when you see it, and being forced to recall
> some of its characteristics
>  - always using similar steps to get to a document and having to come up
> with an appropriate search strategy each time
>  - etc...
>
> There is some research that shows that people like to have stable
> structures for their personal archives and that a strong physical metaphor
> ("one item is in one place and one place only") can decrease the cognitive
> load required to use such a system. Search is usually *only* used as a last
> resource tool when the user can not remember at all where he put that
> document...


True, but we don't want to say here that the user is incapable of managing a
library, do we?
Often, in larger libraries, we don't know where something is, we can't
remember.
Memory, as madbob already points out on his pages, is settled in the
temporal lobe of the brain. It degrades with increasing temporal distance to
the event.

Now imagine you have a library of photos covering a 3 year period. Are you
sure you can locate all items by date, then by thumb?

Fred takes an average of 1 picture per day, he will have 365x3 pictures to
go through in this case.
Fred remembers the photo was taken in year 1, winter, so he has about 150
pictures to look at via thumbs.
So much for spacial navigation combined with temporal sorting.

This is perfectly ok, it works for small libraries like Fred's.

Now imagine Jane has a new camera and goes on 4 vacations per year.
On each vacation, Jane takes several hundred shots.
After 3 years, Jane has 4300 photos she made all by herself, he Uncle's 200
wedding photos not even included.
As she tries to find "that picture with Auntie Mabel on that rock" from one
of the vacations, she is confronted with 1200 photos to go through.
Now she complains: "darn, i wish i could just tell the computer to show me
photos of Auntie Mabel".

The reason why we need labeling is not because the other methods don't work.
Labels and tags are necessary, because our libraries are growing too big to
be handled without topical, categorical or attributive management.
As long as we can not associate identifying attributes with storage item
other than filenames, there is no chance at a simple approach to an
intuitive management of larger libraries.