Your Users Probably Don’t Understand the Filesystem

The filesystem of your computer is the complex tree of many, many thousands of folders and files that make up the operating system—all your apps and their resources, and all your documents, images, and music files. Your users likely don’t understand this—nor should they have to.

I’ve witnessed people use Microsoft Word as the primary way to find and retrieve information from their computer or network. They’ll open Word and use the “open” command as a way to browse around their documents. If they come across an image, they’ll open it in a Word document. This probably sounds insane to most computer-literate people. But this makes perfect sense to users who mostly write and manage Word documents. These people aren’t stupid—they just don’t understand how files are stored on their computers.

One of the reasons why smartphones and tablets became...