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Comment by zachware | Hacker News Reader

Excellent piece. I think the main challenge for UX architects is breaking the hiearchical model that users are used to.

Tags are the ideal solution for organizing like items but few have mastered the UI. Sure, it's easy to to build the refrigerator model but users get freaked out when everything is lumped together (that's why websites still have nav bars.)

If someone can master the art of the tag UI, then we're set.

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I don't think tags are the solution. Human beings organize stuff by lumping similar things together, by spatial relationship. It's the way the brain is designed to make sense of things on a neurological level.

Tags create a meta layer of information on top of the actual spatial organization of objects, which is hard to comprehend naturally.

The problem is we have too many virtual things to organize them spatially. It worked with the finder when each user have a few or few dozens of or maybe even a few hundred files they cared about. Now computers have millions of files, and I don't see how we can sensibly organize them spatially and still find things.

I would say that now the dominant way of finding things on a computer is not organization at all, but search. Type some words describing the thing you want to find. We've been trained by Google that we should always be able to find anything we want this way.

True, but right now search fails miserably for images. It might not, if people tagged their images better (facebook does a good job of getting people to do this), but most people don't.

Why do you say that tags can't represent the spatial organization of objects? Can't you lump similar things together, by putting them under the same tag?

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