April 2, 2003
Lost in spatiality.
John Siracusa has written numerous enlightening articles about OS X going back to the early developer previews. This week he specifically takes the OS X Finder to task for not being a successful spatial user environment. About the Finder… isn’t so much about slamming the obvious problems and interface widgets that everyone loves to hate, but more about exploring why some concepts are better than others as related to the way humans learn and interact with things. Basically, the spatial Finder works more like the way people explore and search and noodle and uncover information. Earlier iterations of the Mac OS prove this on several levels. Many of John’s points and explanations harken back to the days when Tog preached, Apple listened, and the desktop was a more usable piece of real estate. I particularly agree with his assessment that path-based navigational leftovers are tied more to the historical Unix underpinnings of the OS than to task efficiency and true usability.
… the apparent efficiency of path-based file management and navigation is an illusion created by the lack of visual clutter, and the invisibility of the effort expended in order to build up and maintain a working set of abstract file path information in the mind of the user. In reality, the 'total cost' of such an interface is very high, the capacity is very low, and the recall speed and memory persistence is poor when compared with more visual interfaces.
Word. I also love the fact that he unearths a few elements from the ill-fated Copland user interface — like “live search folders” to show how smart the Finder could be. If you hate the new Finder, read this article. If you love the new Finder, read it as well. Maybe a few big brains at Apple will have a gander at it too.
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