IEEE Proceedings of 4 th International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction, Kharagpur, India, December 27-29, 2012 Natural Arrangement: A Novel and Intuitive Perspective on Filesystem Re-Organization Debmalya Sinha Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Kharagpur, India Email: debmalya.01@gmail.com Anupam Basu Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Kharagpur, India Email: anupambas@gmail.com Abstract—Proper semantic categorization and organization of ﬁlesystem is the key to ﬁnd ﬁles and folders later easily. There is a signiﬁcant role of rearrangement of ﬁles between different folders by cut/copy and paste while organizing a ﬁlesystem. Conventional ﬁle browsers have only unidirectional ﬁle copy system where a ﬁle can be copied only between one folder to another at a time. However, there are three more kinds of such rearrangement exist; between one-to-many folders, many-to-one folder and many-to-many folders. The limitations of unidirectional copy of existing ﬁle browsers require the user to simulate many-to-one folder rearrangement by doing one-to-one folder copy repeatedly. Whereas, the natural strategy to copy items in a many-to-one relation is to pick up items from each source and then copy them together into the destination. This paper describes a novel ﬁle browser design that imple- ments the natural strategy of ﬁle copy between many-to-one folders. It also discusses the efﬁciency of the scheme compared to conventional ﬁle browsers by a KLM-GOMS model analysis. Index Terms—HCI, ﬁle browser, ﬁle management, Natural User Interface, personal information management I. I NTRODUCTION The role of ﬁle copy is a very important yet neglected part of a ﬁle browser design. The highly increasing number of cheap peripheral storage devices like “USB pen drives”, “hard disks”, “mobile phones” repeatedly require copying ﬁles from a source to its destination. Also, in an ever growing ﬁlesystem[9][6], it is very important to categorize and organize ﬁles and folders properly to ﬁnd items from the ﬁlesystem later easily. This requires repeated copying of ﬁles between many folders. The conventional ﬁle browsers provide only basic unidirectional ﬁle copy mechanisms which work between only two folders at a time in an one-to-one copy relationship. Users can only copy ﬁles from one folder to just an other destination folder. However, in real life, there are three more kinds of copy relationship exist beside one-to-one relation; one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many. Users have to simulate these other three types of copy relations by the one- to-one copy. For example, if the user wants to copy from three source folders to one destination(many-to-one), then she will have to copy from the ﬁrst source folder to the destination, and then repeat the process for the other two sources. In contrast to the one-to-one copy scheme of ﬁle browsers, the natural strategy (in physical world) for transferring items from multiple source to one destination(many-to-one) is to “pick up” relevant items from all the sources at once, and then put all the items into the destination. As the ﬁle browser only provides one-to-one copy mechanism, re-arranging ﬁles between many folders is a practical and common problem while ﬁle browsing ﬁrstly because it is contrary to the natural strategy and secondly it takes much more time to repeat the same process for all destination folders. A Natural User Interface(NUI) is where the interface itself is invisible to the user; i.e: it mimics the natural strategies or intuitions of the user to do a certain task in physical world, so that there are little or no cognitive load while learning and using the interface. This paper designs a natural ﬁle browser interface “SahajBrowser” which mimics this natural strategy of humans on its novel ﬁle copy mechanism to help users re- arrange ﬁles between multiple folders intuitively. This mainly focuses on a novel many-to-one copy scheme similar to the physical many-to-one item copy strategy of the users so that the cognitive load is substantially reduced while ﬁle browsing. A. Related Works Although the conventional ﬁle browses provide only prim- itive ﬁle copy mechanisms, there are some new concepts[5], [3] that rule out the need of folders and makes a pile with the ﬁles[2]. Perhaps the most prominent of them is BumpTop[4]. It creates a physical desk like 3D ﬁle browsing environment where the interface is based on realistic 3D icons scattered into the virtual 3D desktop which moves by the laws of physics (large icons depicting big ﬁles move slowly, etc). Each of these designs and concepts are promising and attempts on Natural ﬁle browser UI but unfortunately comes with some constraints. Almost all of these graphic intensive 3D interfaces are targeted to use with a touchscreen and other expensive hardwares which is costly and in reach of only a speciﬁc group of users. Secondly, studies[1] show that there are almost always much cognitive load attached with 3D visualization while learning and using. In our viewpoint, natural ﬁle browser interface does not necessarily mean 3D interfaces. The main focus should be a design that mimics the natural way of thinking of the users. Thus, instead of making yet another 3D interface, we have designed a ﬁle browser “SahajBrowser” from a new 978-1-4673-4369-5/12/$31.00 c 2012 IEEE