[treggle]

Programmers love trees but they really aren’t the basis of good user experience.

I spent years building tree oriented uis before realizing.

The specific application envisaged in the parent post is a solution without a problem, that scratches the programmers itch.

[vanderZwan]

Can you share some experiences and insights? Maybe UIs that you think are better alternatives in specific contexts

[treggle]

Essentially all the existing Ui paradigms are better.

Trees are fiddly and poky things to navigate.

Tree oriented uis leave information hidden and require lots of clicks. Ugh.

Special cases and complexities constantly arise in tree oriented uis and clear consistent solutions are often hard to fit in to the system.

Programmers love trees though because truth is a lot of data is in tree form so the assume that data structure should be surfaced to the user.

It not correct though. Simple flat uis are much better.

My obsession with trees culminated in building a major business system that realized my dream of a fully tree oriented ui. It was shit.

I totally redesigned and rebuilt it several years down the track.

Now I don’t put trees in uis.

[abtinf]

I agree that generalized trees require too many clicks.

What I really like are the limited depth, non-collapsing trees in a lot of UIs now. Like in Slack, where the left nav has few top level nodes—pinned channels/chats, channels, and chats—that make it easy to get exactly what is needed. It’s not perfect (like I would prefer an aggregated pin that simply shows everything from all pins in one conversation dialog), but it is visually clean and efficient. And instead of a giant tree to enumerate all channels, you use a dedicated search interface that makes it easy to add entries to tree with a single click (without having to interact with the tree).

[yehaaa]

GUI based file system navigation is another example where surfacing a tree works well.