Designed for Use

Takeaway Points

• Sometimes, hierarchies work well, but they need to be obvious and commonly accepted.

• Hierarchies work less well if people have to come up with them on their own, especially when several people share a hierarchy.

• Humans are pretty good at dealing with time and space. Try to use them, rather than hierarchies, to organize user data.

• If you must use hierarchies, try to keep the structure shallow, allow items to exist in more than one place, support metadata, and support alternative ways of accessing the data.