A useful property of 2-pane PIMs

Posted by Chris Thompson
Feb 19, 2008 at 08:33 AM

I’d argue the opposite of the consensus in this thread: two pane outliners tend to conceal information, making it harder to find. Approaches that I think are useful in rediscovering information:
1) automatic embedded clustering or classifier algorithms - i.e. when you’re viewing an item, there’s an area of the screen that suggests possibly related items
2) wiki-like manually created links between items
3) single pane outliners with an adjunct view showing major headings/topics - note that this is subtly different from two pane outliners, which require you to click through to get to specific topics; there’s at least a chance with single pane outliners that you’ll find info by scrolling through it
4) graphical views - at the minimum, thumbnails, though I’ve found that there’s a certain minimum size before thumbnails become useful in recognizing information; small icons are useless

The only thing that’s worse at helping to discover things than two pane outliners are pure tag-based systems. Tag clouds help, but they have a tendency to hide the small things.

—Chris