Hierarchies

Each and all of the home media interfaces I've looked at and tried, are based on hierarchical menus and folders. I'm trying to figure out what's good and what's wrong with hierarchies, and what's the alternative.
Thoughts or suggestions, anyone?

What’s wrong with hierarchies?

Hierarchies gives the impression that something can only belong in one place, like a paper folder in a file cabinet.

Hierarchies infers a structure of parent and child, even when that's not true.

If we don’t know exactly which parent something is a child of, we have to start digging: the picture was taking during our vacation, but was it in June or July? The 21st or 22nd?

In hierarchical structures it can be hard to get an overview, because things are hidden inside eachother. An example of this is clear when comparing Picasa with Windows Explorer. When you open a folder in Explorer, you can't see the photos in the folder you were in before. So if you open "March 2006" you can see "April 2006". Picasa shows all photos in one pane, regardless of hierarchy so that March and April is visible at the same time.





Another problem visible in the Explorer example, is the Back-Back-Back-problem. In many interfaces you go into a folder, and into a folder and into a folder again. If it's a dead end, you have to back up three times or hit the Menu key or something and then start digging.

If we have to store something in just one place, it requires standards and knowledge to place it right, for instance like librarians arranging books in the Dewey Decimal System.

Hierarchies are best for arranging smaller amounts of objects. As the number of websites increased, Yahoo went from being a directory to become a search engine.

So while Yahoo's taxonomy places me here Arts > Design Arts > Industrial Designers, Google means that I belong here Business > Industries > Design > Industrial Designers. And who's to say that one's right and the other's wrong? Maybe people looking for me here:
World > Norsk > Referanse > Utdanning > Universitet og høgskoler > Vitenskapelige høgskoler >... Coming to a TV near you :)

What's good with hierarchies?

When there is a 1:1 parent-child relationship it allows us to make decisions in multiple steps. Examples of this is dates, and tv-series:





If the hierarchy is correctly buildt, it can help us look for something we know what we’re looking for, but not where it is. It also helps us eliminate: I know it wasn’t in 2005 or 2007, and that leaves 2006.

When we know what we’re looking for, and where it is, hierarchies can be easy to remember. Especially if there is logic associations tied to the placement: the cheese fork is in my flat, in the kitchen, in the top drawer.

What's the alternatives to hierachies?

An unstructured, incomplete list:

Textbased searching through titles, reviews, tags and metadata.
Associating objects, saying “what I’m looking for reminds me of this and this and this.”
Zooming in from an overview of everything, and inwards to what you’re looking for.
Eliminating from a generated selection presented to us, saying “from these three, it’s nothing like this one or this one” or “nothing like any of them”.
Surfing through a huge collection from a starting point, not knowing where you’ll end up. From one object, then from it’s links to another, then from it’s link to another. Skipping from stone to stone...
Pinpointing, very much like surfing, but saying "more like this" and then "more like this" and adding all your choice up to narrow out the thing you're looking for. Could be called Sequential, additive associating...

What do you people do, really?

I've been talking to people about tv and movies. I try to collect a list of how we hear about tv-shows, how we watch them, where we get to know about movies, what we do with it, who we do that with. Can you help me make the list insanely long?

- We read magazines about movies.
- We watch tv-shows about movies.
- We watch tv-shows about other tv-shows.
- We read websites about movies.
- We watch video on the web.
- We watch tvshows on the web.
- We hear about movies on the radio.
- We talk with friends about things we like.
- We watch things we don't like with friends who do.
- We help our parents figure out how to watch DVDs.
- We videotape our kids and show to our parents.
- We show videos of our kids to our kids later in life.
- We watch videos of ourselves (konfirmasjonsvideo :)
- We buy DVDs and give them away.
- We buy a magazine and get a free DVD.
- We buy a box of cornflakes and get a bad DVD.
- We buy DVDs and lend them to our friends.
- We borrow DVDs which we never return.
- We rent movies and forget to return them.
- We download movies illegally from the web.
- We teach others how to download movies illegally from the web.
- We accidentally mention a tvshow to strangers.
- We talk about something that was on TV last night.
- We walk past the cinema and catch a glance at a movie poster.
- We invite eachother home to watch shows or movies.
- We talk about the movie on our way out from the cinema.
- We have dates at the cinema...
- We look forward to movies are released.
- We're sad when a season of a tv-series ends.
- We cried when the last episode of Friends was on.
- We still buy Seinfeld on DVD.
- We still watch Seinfeld when it's rerun on TVNorge.
- We borrow VHS at the library.
- We rent a VHS and don't have to return it.

What do you do? Or your parents? Any Tekst-TV users out there? Or Hotel Cæsar fans? Kiss and tell!