Search & hierarchies

With the new-found enthusiasm for tagging and folksonomy all around, combined with my passion for all-things-findability, I have been following up on these areas. My interest in information organization & hierarchies also stems from mailViz, a personal project that I am pursuing (among a dozen other things, I'm afraid). This involves the design of an email-visualization add-on to Outlook Express that will 1) enable a more visual view of emails in the system 2) produce better/richer alternatives for information-seeking. (Write to me if you'd like to be involved in this project, the concept & design are still in the very early stages).

So as part of this project, I am looking into the whole issue of folders & how they can be improved upon/done away with/what are the alternatives. I found the following posts useful to start off with:

• Desktop Search: The End of Folders?Posted Jun 9, 2005, 9:07 PM ET by Brad Hill.
  Much buzz is circulating about the Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight feature replacing the traditional file-management system of nested folders. Spotlight is X’s built-in desktop searcher. If the search is so transparent, effortless, and accurate as to render the folder view irrelevant, Spotlight has great implications for Windows-based systems (Longhorn), and, by extension, for search companies.Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I have trouble conceiving the death of nested folders. I use Google Desktop Search and Yahoo! Desktop, and appreciate the tremendous improvement over the panting Windows search puppy, but the folder structure remains active in my mind. I don’t always want a spotlight to laser into a single file. Often, my preference is to view an entire folder’s contents. Admittedly, I am freakishly organized about placing files in correct folders, and I create elaborate folder hierachies to match my mental organization. When using desktop music programs, I sometimes use their search functions to find individual tracks in my collection, but just as often I go into the folders via My Computer and drag desired tracks into the media player. Searching and browsing enjoy equal emphasis in my computing lifestyle. So while I’m all in favor of improved desktop search, I cannot (yet) get my mind around a computer with no folders.Tagging blog:You're It!
  
• The Death of Hierarchy?John Hiler has an interesting post on Microcontentnews called Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders. He talks about how that computing standby the folder is being replaced by search and tags:Hierarchical Folders have helped us manage information for decades. They’ve proven themselves as some of the most flexible tools ever created: organizing wildly different industries, from Web Directories, to Email and Desktop File Systems.But Folders rarely solve the core problem that they address - and often create new ones, like forcing you to create new folders just to manage new information. Solutions like Search, Archives, Stars and Labels get more directly at the core problem… and promise that the future of information management will look very different from its past.Dan Brown posted a thoughtful follow-up that digs into the distinctions between hierarchy and structure:Hiler is right to point out that folder-based navigation is going away, but I think it’s dangerous to extend the demise of the folder (a bad metaphor) to the demise of hierarchy and formal structure. There is still a place for formal structure in interface design, even if it doesn’t look or behave like our old friend the folder.It’s also dangerous to compare “hierarchy” with “search.” Hierarchy is, most typically, a part-whole organization of things. Search, on the other hand, is a behavior where users specify some criteria and the computer does the work of locating objects that share something in common with them. These two notions are hardly mutually exclusive. Perhaps Hiler meant to compare search with browse, a behavior where users select from menus of options to arrive at the desired thing.In Hiler’s three “search” case studies, there is evidence of formal structure, though it’s under the surface. With Gmail, for example, there’s still the notion of a thread which contains messages. There is an inbox and an archive, which contain threads. There are relationships between original messages and replies. These are abstract hierarchies that are inherent to the information architecture, not layered on top like a folder structure. They may seem self-evident, but constructing these hierarchies requires a careful, user-aware design process.Indeed, structure is useful. And instead of one structural option–the folder–we now have derived structure (like search engine indexes and the derived polyhierarchies in iTunes) and user-applied structure (tags, labels, links, playlists). This is not the death of hierarchy; it’s the augmentation of hierarchy.