The Hindu Business Line : Find your file, with visuals

Words may fail you, but images? Unlikely, for we tend to remember visuals better. Here's an initiative to name files using visuals, so you can pull what you want out of your folders in a jiffy.

YOU remember a poster for a cultural festival from way back in college, but can't remember the news item you read just the day before yesterday. That is common. And it is not surprising. Research shows that we remember visuals better than we remember words.

In the modern office scenario, you send and receive a hundred files a day through e-mail; you create and save scores of files every day on your desktop.

Many times a day, you have to stop and search for a file that you received last week or created last month. Now how would you sort this out? Many people evolve a system of file names or a system of saving in date-wise folders. But many files are not organised this way because you received them from someone else and just saved them.And now you want one of those files right away!

Now, how do you solve this problem in the kitchen? You have transparent containers so that you can see through to find out what they contain; or you have containers of different shapes to remember what they contain; or better still, you have labels or stickers on containers that look similar to let you know what they contain. What if you were to have a similar facility for your files: a label dispenser to label your files?

Okay, so is the filename not a label? Yes, it is, but the problem is that it is like a kitchen label printed in 8-point size. Looking for a file through its filename when you have to rush it for a print job is like looking for spices labelled in 8-point when your lasagna is thickening on the stove.

How would you like labels with pictures printed on them for the kitchen?

That's why a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and ESC entertainment has developed a prototype system called VisualID.

Towards `visual scenery'

The system assigns individual icons to files and creates visual `scenery' in the way in which the icons are designed. Typically, files in the same format are assigned the same icon. But the difference in visual representation doesn't go beyond that. The new system mutates the icons based on the format and the filename. Most documents with the same format will be represented by similar icons, but each file will be assigned a slightly mutated visual as icon.

Typically, for example, all Word documents will look similar but each Word document will have a different icon that represents only that particular document. The researchers have assumed that the file name will reflect the meaning of the file to the user, and therefore, have designed the system to mutate the icon visual based on the file name. Therefore, files with similar names will have similar icons to represent them.

The researchers' first study showed that users very quickly learned the connection between the VisualIDs and file names and that there was a 30 per cent improvement in search and find when users were asked to find the files with the help of VisualIDs. A second study to relate the system more to real life experience - people only remember the content and not the file name - also proved that users performed better with VisualIDs rather than with generic icons.

For the future, the researchers are clear that VisualIDs are not meant to replace existing methods of manipulating or identifying and searching for files. For example, the VisualIDs will co-exist with sort/search through date modified, file type, etc. An issue is basically whether we can remember icons for the thousands of files that our computers contain. A typical user's computer contains tens of thousands of files. However, we use only a subset of these files - files relating to an on-going project or expenses details - on a day-to-day basis. The VisualIDs help easily finding these files.

nagaraj@thehindu.co.in

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