Part 3: How does Stacks, stack up?
A case study on Mojave’s new feature: Stacks
Introduction
From reading the original 1992 Patent for ‘Piles’ and doing my own personal investigation behind Stacks, I can see that through the (almost 30 year) transition, certain traits made the cut and carried over, while some did not. For example, Stacks, only consists of system created Stacks, but no User created ones. (The closest you can get to User created Stacks, is to order your Stacks by Tags.) Why is this? Did Apple not believe these traits to be beneficial and purposefully left them out? Or perhaps the idea is still in development and these traits will make their debut in a later version? Either way, I believe that some of the omitted characteristics from the original ‘Piles’ idea could be beneficial in increasing the usability for Stacks.
Depends on how you Stack it?
Probably the biggest difference I can see between the original design document for ‘Piles’ and what Stacks is today, is the amount of customization. ‘Piles’ suggested offering the user the opportunity to create their own Pile, as well as develop the System-Created Piles, through user-system collaboration. Stacks offers very little room for modification, you are only given six options by which you can sort your files by:
- By Kind
- Date Last Opened
- Date Added
- Date Modified
- Date Created
- Tags
While this does offer a wide range of options for sorting your files, I feel it lacks a certain amount of freedom for the user. With organization comes a certain level of creativity also. It is the same reason you have trouble finding the utensil drawer in another home. Because we organize our things in a way that best suites our needs.
Extensive research was conducted for the ‘Piles’ proposal, in order to find out how workers decided to organize large amounts of information within their work space. The results suggested that most workers would keep all of the information they needed within their physical office, and would organize that information into separate piles, one for each project, at a distance that reflected its urgency. Piles were also used in a way to organize new information that they weren’t able to attend to yet.
To the outside observer, an office containing piles often appears disorganized. However all of our participants had several piles in their workspace and in most cases, they knew what was in each pile and could tell us quite a lot about its history. Seemingly disordered piles were often sensible to the person who created them, because they developed through many interactions over a long period of time. —Mander [3]
Though the research was done back in the early 90’s, the information gathered is just as relevant today as it was almost 30 years ago. By giving the user the ability to customize Stacks they way they want to, it allows them to run their desktop more efficiently according to their specific workflow, It might not make sense to everyone else, but the user knows exactly how things are organized. For example, as a designer, the way I organize my files is not by kind or by the date I created them, but by which project I am currently working on, and through my experience with Stacks thus far, I have yet to find an option that works great for me.[4]
Even before our team received the ‘Piles’ patent I was disappointed in the lack of control I had over my Stacks, not only could I not create a more customizable ‘Stacks’ option for myself, but I also could not control the way that my files were organized within that specific Stack. So when I read the 1992 Design proposal for what ‘Piles’ could be, and compared it to the current version of Stacks, it was almost like flying first class just to find out you have to go back to riding coach.
Visual Representation
We do see the implementation of a disheveled ‘Pile’ look (upper right) with Stacks, maintaining an affordance (an object that’s physical attributes influence its function.) of a physical stack. However, a problem we see with this is that unlike in real life where you can tell how large a stack is and generally what the stack consists of, Stacks offers little to no visual or written representation for how much content is included in each given stack.
Stacks does offer an alternative sollution to this problem with the (Command J) option:
By pressing Command-J on your keyboard you can access the dialogue box for your desktop,(image above) near the bottom where it says “show item info” if you select that box it allows you to view the information regarding each stack and folder. For example, now I can see that I have nine screenshots on my desktop.
From the image above (left) I would assume that the stack consisted of about three to four images, I would have no clear indication that the Stack actually consisted of 46 images. You can see why this could be a potential problem, if you were to open a Stack that contained a couple hundred images you would flood your desktop. But unless each user is aware of the command-J option, there would be no to tell just how large your Stacks were getting. Where Stacks already uses an affordance for letting the user know it’s a Stack of files, it would be simple to either add the information below by default or visually represent it in the way the Stack is displayed.
Conclusion
While some features from the original 1992 patent made it into the release of Stacks, some did not, and while we can only speculate as to why this is the case, what we can know for sure is that the idea behind Stacks is solid. It works because it serves a basic, human function. Mankind has used stacking as a form of organization for geneartions, so it was only a matter of bringing it into the digital world.
Understanding your users and their motivations provides valuable insights. That understanding doesn’t go stale; the features and functions derived from it have longevity. —Gitta Salomon [4]
Continue reading….Case Study Conclusion
References
[1]Photo by Christa Dodoo on Unsplash
[2]Photo by Jesus Hilario H. on Unsplash[3]Mander, Richard, Salomon, Gitta, Wong, Yin, Yin, et al. “A ‘Pile’ Metaphor for Supporting Casual Organization of Information — Semantic Scholar.” Undefined, 1 Jan. 1992, www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-%22Pile%22-Metaphor-for-Supporting-Casual-of-Mander-Salomon/5c71a81f1b934a9fc7765a225ae4a8833071ad17?navId=paper-header.
[4]Salomon, Gitta. “Messy Humans Don’t Evolve (as Quickly as Technology).” Medium.com, Medium, 29 Sept. 2018, medium.com/@gittasalomon/messy-humans-dont-evolve-as-quickly-as-technology-fb9ffc74c2a7.
