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As for users’ ability to experience the benefits of spatial consistency, regardless of whether they understand the origin, my views are continually reinforced by the masses’ unflagging devotion to the lone remaining relentlessly spatially consistent interface element: the desktop. People love to fill their desktops with files, and the less comfortable a person is with computers, the more likely he or she is to do so.
The reason is simple: the desktop is the one “place” on the computer that every user knows how to get to. People don’t even think of it as existing in the file hierarchy (though, of course, it does); to them it’s a location in the physical sense, and items placed within it behave almost as if they were real objects. A file can be “lost” in the file hierarchy—irretrievably, as far as novice users are concerned—but finding something on the desktop will never be any worse than rummaging through the messiest real-life junk drawer. And that bargain, that task of keeping things neat by placing, removing, and arranging, is something that people are comfortable with, and that their innate human abilities are tailored for.
The reason is simple: the desktop is the one “place” on the computer that every user knows how to get to. People don’t even think of it as existing in the file hierarchy (though, of course, it does); to them it’s a location in the physical sense, and items placed within it behave almost as if they were real objects. A file can be “lost” in the file hierarchy—irretrievably, as far as novice users are concerned—but finding something on the desktop will never be any worse than rummaging through the messiest real-life junk drawer. And that bargain, that task of keeping things neat by placing, removing, and arranging, is something that people are comfortable with, and that their innate human abilities are tailored for.
— John Siracusa, on file system browsers.
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