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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Tree View Removal Surgery
From:       Diego Moya <turingt () gmail ! com>
Date:       2005-10-13 22:16:27
Message-ID: 11ee04940510131516l46675988o () mail ! gmail ! com
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I just stumbled onto this article at the Interaction Design Group
discuss list from ixdg.org.

http://ripul.blogspot.com/2005/10/tree-view-removal-surgery_112919819961257081.html

It describes the problems of using a tree view as the main navigation
device in applications. This is a pet peeve of mine since Tree Views
are viewed as powerful device and using (abusing) them as a good
design practice by OSS developers, when really the opposite is true -
and many otherwise excellent OSS apps suffer from this misconception.
The article explains how to solve the problems of this interface
model.

This other link explain why Tree Views are usually a bad architectural
choice for task-based interfaces:
http://ripul.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-is-tree-view-poor-navigational.html

As a summary of the problems:
1. Many types of artifacts make the navigation confusing.
2. Non consistent mental model.
3,4. Many points and clicks  are actually slow.
5. Poor navigational help.
6. No use of spatial memory.
7. Poor  navigational clues.
8. System model differs from user mental model.
9. Takes too much of space.
10. Blank leaf nodes.
11. Vertical and horizontal scrolling.
12. Difficult to implement.
12. Only developers  understand deep hierarchies.
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