A Better Hierarchical System
In some cases, it is simply not possible to avoid hierarchical systems. If you feel that you need to go with a hierarchy, here are a few ideas that should help you make this system as usable as possible.
Restrict Depth
If you give people just a little bit of rope, they’ll have a harder time using it to hang themselves. If you give people the ability to create only shallow hierarchies, they probably won’t get lost in them. One example of such a system is the photo-sharing site Picasa, which allows its users to sort their pictures into albums but doesn’t let them put one album into another album. An album contains a number of pictures, and that’s it. It’s unlikely that people will lose their albums, since they can’t ...
Get Designed for Use now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
