How the Smartphone killed the Folder

As apps eat the world, we take a look at why the folder as an organizational paradigm ceases to be relevant.

It’s been a good run. All the way from the time I formatted my 40 GB hard drive into C:\ and D:\Games, D:\Music, D:\Movies, to meticulously organizing all 40 gigabytes of my music into 5 level folder structures, to moving files I wanted to save into the cloud.

But now it’s time to say goodbye, and acknowledge that the folder as an organizational paradigm, is dead.

(Unless you make your living writing code, in which case you will be sharpening your knives right about now.)

Why was the folder so useful?

The folder is/was an overarching concept which embodied how you would think about concepts in the real world — grouping together related items in order to achieve a task. The folder as an organizational paradigm worked really well because it was agnostic to what type of content you put in it, as long as it was a file compatible with the operating system. This was its most powerful feature — it allowed us to dump ideas and things which we thought belonged together, in one place, thus replicating our mental model as closely as possible.

For example, if you were writing a book, your folder would contain word documents, notes, pdfs, some presentations, all neatly organized into sub folders (of course). All of these file types were associated with their own programs (I haven’t used that word in a while), but could still be grouped together in a folder.

What has changed?

Over the last 10 years, however, things have changed very very rapidly, all thanks to Mr. Smartphone. It’s almost easy to forget how easily the smart-phone-with-a-touch-screen has permeated our workflow. The images below will illustrate the shift.

Apps are eating folders.

Applications on your phone have superseded your organizational structure by creating types of content only they can handle.

1. Types of content have exploded — Gone are the days when you could categorize your content as Word, PowerPoint or Excel. Email, calendar invites, web articles, notifications, contacts, are just some of the types of content you are bombarded with daily, each created by an app trying to solve a particular problem for you. Applications on your phone have superseded your organizational structure by creating types of content only they can handle. There is no folder-like paradigm which envelopes all these types of content.
2. Sources of content have exploded — You have 40 apps installed on your phone and interact daily with at least 10, which more often than not include, two email accounts, two messengers, two shopping applications, two apps to get news, (more than) two social networks etc. All of these apps are constantly throwing content at you in the form of notifications, and, (whether by design or not) there seems to be a lack of a model to connect all these apps together. At what point does this become unmanageable? Houston, we have a problem.
3. The Age of the Smartphone — For better or for worse, we are in an age where the mobile phone is going to be used more and more for any activity you would have 5 years ago done exclusively on your PC. On the phone, many of the old constructs that were built for the PC (case in point being the folder system) collapse like a pack of cards. As of now, nobody has been able to evolve a foolproof way to manage all of your content on your phone — nothing comparable to the file system on the PC (despite all its flaws) exists.
4. Ubiquity of search- An organizational paradigm is relevant only because it makes finding easier. With search becoming more and more powerful, both on and off device, the need to organize content (in order to know where it is) has reduced dramatically.
5. The limitations of folders— Folders were built for a world where there were only a few types of files. How do you organize a contact, a calendar invite, and an email, all relating to the same task together in a folder? It’s just not possible. Another glaring problem with folders is that a folder structure does not account for the fact that one file might be associated with multiple concepts. Tagging has tried to solve this problem, but an ideal solution probably involves a re-imagining of the folder concept to work seamlessly with tags.

Cutting to the chase

In the App + Smartphone world your content is controlled by apps, and so far no paradigm has emerged which lets you seamlessly connect content from across apps and allows you to replicate your mental model — grouping related items together.

So now what?

Here’s how we are approaching the problem.

Cubeit Cards

1. Cards — Google has shown us the way, and now it is for us to follow. Every type of content from calendar invites to music videos, is standardized into cards, which put important information front and center. (Think of it as Google Now for all of your content).
2. Cubes— By standardizing to the card format for every type of content, we were able to achieve another goal. The barrier that apps create against aggregating heterogeneous data under a single concept disappears. You can now put together content from multiple apps in an easily consumable form, ready to let you achieve a task.

The Cube on the left was used while we were hiring a designer for our team. It contains email cards, link cards to the portfolio and LinkedIn profile, contact cards, calendar cards for meeting invites, and map cards to figure out where to meet. In a less futuristic world, you would be switching back and forth between 5 apps to achieve one single task.

Not any more.

The possibilities that aggregation of heterogeneous content from apps open up are endless.

As we learn more and more, we can realistically look at a scenario where we can pull in data from multiple accounts and organize it automatically for you.

So that’s our idea

Cubeit is now in private beta on Android, and we have a few invites to give out for beta testers.

Update: We’ve moved on to a public beta, so head over to our website and give us a whirl!

If you’re up to help build the next big thing in mobile, leave a note/recommend and I’ll reach out to you with an invite.

Cover image credit: http://cupcake.nilssonlee.se/