Exploring tabletop file system interaction

Tabletop interfaces provide a new medium for collocated collaboration. Consequently, tabletops need to support access to file systems, just as a core facility of conventional computer systems is to provide an interface to a file system. However, the constraints of tabletop interfaces call for rethinking standard approaches to file system interaction. This paper presents the design of OnTop, a novel associative-search approach to file system interaction: users navigate multiple file systems by selecting focus files, retrieving similar ones. We report a small-scale qualitative evaluation of OnTop against a more conventional file browser approach: OnTop was consistently preferred and found to be more efficient, especially for larger file collections.

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