Here's a excerpt from "Designing Interfaces", a book that I am currently reading.
Many people use the desktop background as a place to
put documents, frequently used applications, and
other such things. It turns out that people tend to
use spatial memory to find things on the desktop,
and it’s very effective. People devise their own
groupings, for instance, or recall that “the document
was at the top right over by such-and-such.”
(Naturally, there are real-world equivalents too.
Many people’s desks are “organized chaos,” an apparent
mess in which the office owner can find
anything instantly.
Do people actually remember the names of their important folders, or remember their spatial locations? What a tree-view of the system gives you is not just a hierarchy, but also a way of reaching your data through a sequence of spatially organized shortcuts.
Snowfox's address bar may make it hard for most users to find their stuff, because it does not let them use their spatial memory. In this case, tags might be useful. In extreme cases where desktops are overly cluttered to even recall where an item is, it might be useful to remember something like "work", "science project".
This gives me some food for thought to think about new ways of visually organizing files based on tags and bookmarks. Maybe this might turn out to be a major interface feature.
