Beyond the Shoe Box: Foundations for Flexibly Organizing Photographs on a Computer

As a foundation for designing computer-supported photograph management tools, we have been conducting focused experiments. Here, we describe our analysis of how people initially organize collections of familiar images. We asked 26 subjects in pairs to organize 50 images on a common horizontal table. Each pair then organized a different 50-image set on a computer table of identical surface area. The bottom-projected computer tabletop displayed our interface to several online, pile- based affordances we wished to evaluate. Subjects used pens to interact with the system. We highlight aspects of the computer environment that were notably important to subjects and others that they cared about less than we had hypothesized. For example, a strong majority preferred computer-generated representations of piles to be grid- shaped over several alternatives, some of which mimicked the physical world closely and others that used transparency to save space.