Escaping Hierarchies and Desktops: Associative, Pervasive File Access with User Control

There has long been recognition of the limitations of hierarchical file systems, particularly when people need collections of files, email and web pages for a new task. An associative file access mechanism offers promise in addressing these limitations. Such a mechanism is particularly appealing for personal file access at pervasive interaction devices, such as tabletops, providing an excellent means for collaborating with personal files. A key challenge for providing such a mechanism is ensuring effective user control over the associative access, so that it both achieves the potential to escape the limitations of hierarchies and it ensures the user can understand and control it. We describe a user-controlled associative file access interface, Focus, and in particular the design of its Inspector interface which operates on a smartphone, making it a gateway to the user’s files. We report a qualitative study designed to assess whether participants could use the phone’s Inspector and Focus on a tabletop to readily access file collections for tasks requiring crossing the hierarchical file structure. We also studied how well participants understood the results of the associative access mechanism and how well they could control it, altering the particular search for the new demands of different tasks. All 12 participants were able to use the system effectively for all three aspects: finding the files needed; understanding why particular files were retrieved; and controlling the associative access. The key contribution of this paper is a new associative file access mechanism that users can control. A secondary contribution is Focus and its Inspector which provide a new means for pervasive file access, making tabletops and other embedded display devices useful for group file access.