The Desktop & File/Folder Metaphors – Broken

by Paul Sherman on March 9, 2008 · 8 comments


(Click picture to see full-sized)

This is a picture of the desktop of an individual who has given up organizing their files and folders, and instead relies completely on Spotlight to access their files. I’ve said in the past that I think the desktop metaphor is insufficient for managing the stuff we now store on our computing devices. (Thanks to Flickr user danpatmore for the pic.)

I’m currently writing an article on this for UXmatters. (And I’m very late, my profuse apologies Pabini…). I’ll follow up on this line of thinking here when I cap that article.

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Tagged as: Desktop Apps

  • http://dubroy.com/blog Patrick D

    Heh, great photo. Just looking at it makes me feel anxious though. It reminds me of some of the photos I’ve seen of compulsive hoarding: http://tinyurl.com/36k8d5

    Looking forward to seeing the article on UXMatters! You should take a look at the article I wrote for Boxes + Arrows last year, called “Doing Today’s Job with Yesterday’s Tools”: . It talks about the usability problems with the old file/folder metaphor, and makes some suggestions about how things could be improved.

  • http://dubroy.com/blog Patrick D
  • Paul Sherman

    Cool, thanks for the link Patrick! I’ll check out the article today.

  • Pingback: Dubroy.com/blog - Spring Fever: Links for March 14, 2008

  • http://www.djust.nl Reinier Meenhorst

    @Paul @Patrick Interesting stuff. It makes me wonder what Apple has up its sleeve with future versions of Spotlight, as we become more search driven workers…

  • OxfordjdlkKayla

    In ffice right now will go through this latter.

    Thanks
    kailis
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    aion kina | aion kina

  • sandyxxx

    and secondly,the frequency you update is too high .we are so excited of that .maybe cause that we forget to comments..:)..

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  • sandyxxx

    and secondly,the frequency you update is too high .we are so excited of that .maybe cause that we forget to comments..:)..

    Hot deals–

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