User Interface - Spatial View

There have been quite a lot of discussion in the Open Source desktop community lately, about the adoption of spatial user interfaces. While spatial interfaces are commonly used for things like Web Browsers, it has been quite unpopular to use it for File Managers on an Open Source desktop (Gnome added spatial view to Nautilus with 2.6 recently). Many file managers (and users) still stick to the navigational view (the browser view).

The basic question is: Why would we want to use it? And the answer is quite obvious: Thunar’s major goal is easy-of-use and that’s exactly what we get with the spatial view. Now, if that matches the requirement, why not simply use spatial view? Why write this Wiki page, instead of writing the code already? Mostly because of the users (useless to talk about trolls here, so we’ll concentrate on the real target users):

While spatial views make things easier (that’s the whole point about them actually), many people are too dependent on the more complex views. They’ve used them for years, and their minds have trouble getting used to a “new” concept. If you are new to computing, it’s definetly easier for you to get used to a spatial interface, than a non-spatial/complex interface. But for someone, who has used a browser interface in file managers for years, it costs them quite an effort to realize that it may be easier to use a stripped down interface, rather than a fullblown one.

For example, many people (like myself) have/had totally cluttered home directories, and a horribly bad directory structure, which didn’t matter for me, since I hardly use any file manager, but most of the times, I simply use the shell, where I have aliases for the important directories (a zsh feature). But when I recently started to use a file manager, I realized how bad my home directory layout was - besides that I even re-discovered some files I had been missing for a long time, quite confusing. Being ignorant, my first thought was: GUI file managers (esp. spatial ones) are for wimps… ehm, did I say that I work on a file manager?

Ok, then I decided to power-on my brain, and I realized that it wasn’t the file manager that was bad, but my handling of files and directories was wrong. I had way too many nearly empty directories, and everything was nested too deeply, and the result was that my desktop was cluttered with folder windows (browser mode wasn’t better here, since the treepane on the left gets useless as well, if you browse deep into a directory structure). I could tell more about my personal inabilities, but we’re not here to blog, but we’re here to work - yannow blog less, work more!

So to sum up: The basic problem with a spatial file manager interface is located in the (advanced) user’s mind. Unfortunately patching the corresponding code is impossible most of the times, which brings us back to the basic question:

Can we use a simple UI even if half of our existing user base will complain at the first sight?

It’s worth to analyse the reasons why people complain about a simple UI. The following points are mostly based on research concerning the spatial Nautilus:

• People try to use the spatial view like a navigational view, which of course won’t work, and the result is confusion and frustration.
• Some claim that it’s too much effort to get used to the new concept (judging from the reports, many of them haven’t even tried, so this argument is probably useless).
• Others claim that a simple UI doesn’t allow them to perform complex tasks.

Concerning the last point, I have to say, that for me a simple UI has two basic qualities:

• Make simple tasks easy to accomplish.
• Make complex tasks possible to accomplish.

The existing prototype was extended to include a spatial prototype (in the spatial sub directory).

A screenshot of a desktop with several spatial Thunar windows is available here.