PLM User Experience and The Evil of Folders?

by Oleg on May 24, 2011 · View Comments

Ask people about usability of PLM and other enterprise data management systems. From my experience, the answer is simple – it is way too complex. Very few PDM systems in the past were recognized as simple and easy to use. It made me think about Folders.

Folders: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

A long time ago, folders were invented to organize files in the operation system. The idea of folders and files did proliferate and became the major paradigm for information organization almost everywhere. It was so easy to place files into folders, so office people started to use this organization to store and classify the information. Wide expansion of Windows platforms just helped to spread the idea of folders even more. At the same time, the simplicity of folders has many drawbacks. One of them is the need to duplicate information between folders. The introduction of “shortcuts’ in Windows didn’t solve the problem. In many situations, people will prefer to copy files between folders and not to create a “shortcut” to another folder. Another drawback of folders is inability to find information in an easy way.

CAD / PDM – starting from simple folders

Starting from the early beginning, CAD systems relied on files and folders to save information in computer systems. CAD files spread out on workstations and, later, on PC/Windows computers. The complexity of folder structures introduced various problems related to location of files, references and version management.

Developers of data management solutions for engineers (TDM, EDM, PDM) are heavily inherited and relied on the idea of folder data organizations. It was well understood by people and easy. Many data management systems in the past implant the idea of folder organization and made their solution simple to use. At the same time, in my view, using the same folder paradigm was a problem with increased complexity of data. As a consequence of this, many systems that were initially clear, but system got very complicated with the time.

PLM – Usability Sucks

PLM concepts requires significant expansion of data management scope in the organization. The amount of data and complexity are growing. At the same time, the concept of “folders” was kept by the developers of many PLM systems for capturing and management information structures. It caused a significant complication in data organizations and the overall user experience. Navigating between folders and hierarchical structures became complex and not efficient. File folders, Projects, Requirements, Bill of Materials, Suppliers, Requirements – this is only a short list of various elements of data that need to be organized by PLM.

Possible Solutions

The obvious question asked by many PLM developers was how to improve PLM user experience. Recently, PLM vendors came with several innovations related to that. Some of them moved to enhanced visualization and immersive usage of 3D. Some of them moved to SharePoint as a solution to solve usability issues. However, “folders concept” is still there. Do you think “Folder” is ultimate evil? The discussion is under way, and I don’t see a final point. With the development of some web user interface, we started to see some new and fresh ideas are coming from that side – search, web 2.0, tags and other solutions are proliferating, and we started to see some ideas how to simplify things. At the same time, the conservatism of users pushes it back to something known and even convenient (at least from the beginning).

What is my conclusion? The usability of PLM and other systems related to the data is far away from being optimized. This is not a secret. People demands these days to get it as clean and as simple as possible.  The last recognizable effort to change the status quo, was to present Microsoft SharePoint as a universal hammer to solve the usability problem in the enterprise. This is a place where innovation will continuously happen in a near future.

Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

  • Share/Bookmark

Tagged as: Desktop, Folders, PDM, PLM, Usability

  • Mclayton200

    Whatever happened to meta-DB's and queries systems that link to documents or even standardized document elements (for large structured docs, legal, compliance, spec, etc)?
    Then just add product info to the meta DB to make a PLM from a PDB???
    At least that was the goal many many years ago.

  • beyondplm

    Thanks for comments! I think, you are right, the initial product data systems started as a system of folders with additional metadata. Is it what you mean? Best, Oleg

  • Oleg, we need more posts like that, rediscovering old aspects of data organization which are still active. 

    Regarding forders, we are there because of windows folder structures which is the dominant model for users. Oleg, you are right with the ugly part of the folder concept. You missed one aspect, which is covered by a tag concept, which is that forders are organized under a folder tree structure, and what is important is the word "tree". A tree means that subfolders have one parent only. It means that your data is organized with a single logic using a tree structure, while business data has usually several logics: a drawing can be internal or external, 2D or 3D, input data or output data,etc. A folder structure has to select which aspect to handle at the first level, then at the second level,etc, and if you ask 5 users, you may get 5 different data organization.
    With tags (or so-called facet representations), it may solve the problem, paying attention to the required education of users. That's where PLM vendors have not enough pushed new technology, based on facets and not breakdown structure. But no shame on them, ERP vendors have not understood it either!

    Creating the tags by admin or by users? Great question (the devil is in the details). In theory, Oleg is right, but as soon as you give the right to end users to create tags, they will create many duplicated tags you will need to clean at the end.

    My feeling is that tags should be as limited as business needs, so should be able to be managed securely by admins (above list). And remember old methods: putting tag values in the file name itself. At that time, there was not so many tags!

  • beyondplm

    Francois, thanks for your comments! I can see two separate issues here. 1/hierarchies and 2/ taxonomies / folksonomies.

    1. With regards to hierarchical structures - sometimes is very beneficial to have one. However, most of product data is not hierarchical (even if most of the vendors are using trees), but DAG - direct acyclic graph oriented. However, DAG is too complicated when you try to present it, so many vendors ending up by trees.

    2. This topic even more interesting. I've seen researches proving that number of tags is not growing in folkonimical systems. People tend to use 7-8 tags on average. I can see benefits of people creating tags opposite to admins. At the same time, when admins are creating tags, it is similar to traditional taxonomies.

    Just my thoughts... Best, Oleg

  • Paul Saunders

    A great post Oleg,
    I share your frustrations with folders. We are developing some software (not PLM related) at the moment where we have abandonned folders and are using tags instead. Already at the Alpha stage we are realising the benefits of this strategic decision where entities can "appear" in multiple locations adding to the simplicity of the solution. We allow the tags to be viewed in a similar way to folders if the user desires, so this satisfies the demands of some of the more "stuck in the mud" users as well. If you haven't already I recommend taking a look at how tags are deployed on http://stackoverflow.com We follow a similar (but slightly more enhanced) model to this.
    Paul

  • beyondplm

    Paul, thanks for the comment and sharing of the link. Yes, I think tags is a good alternative in many situations. However, the problem with tags is that it works efficiently only if you have a small amount of tags. When the number of tags is growing it becomes messy. I had a chance to write about tagging solution time ago on my blog - How Tagging can prevent PLM from a Compulsive Obsessive Disorder Problem? (http://plmtwine.com/2009/04/09.... Best, Oleg

  • Paul Saunders

    Good point about tagging becoming messy. Stackoverflow deals with this by only allowing tags to be created by moderator level users. We plan to make tag creation an admin function. Paul

  • beyondplm

    I think, locking tag creation process to admins is wrong. It contradicts the fundamentals of "folksonomy". Tags are created by users. In your case, you will be actually creating a taxonomy with predefined schema, which is completely different data organization. Just my opinion. Best, Oleg

blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: