Comparing File Managers

Managing ones files is one of the most basic functions a computer offers. Considering the time one spends with file management, it would be desirable to do so in the most efficient way. There seems to be a lack of research on how the choice of file managers influences the file managing process and the completion time of tasks users perform. Because of that, we compare three different types of file managers, on different operating systems (OS), to find out if certain ones are better suited for specific tasks and if the same type of file manager performs differently based on the OS used. We compare each OS's standard file manager, the cross-platform dual-pane file manager (Double Commander) and each OS's terminal on Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.10 and macOS 10.4 (as this was the only version available to us through our university). The result of our study with 30 participants show that the default file manager overall performs best, while the terminal performs worst. However this does not hold true for all tasks. The difference in performance of the file managers suggests, that certain file managers are better suited for certain tasks than others. We also found no significant difference between the OS's used when performing the tasks.

Members: Philipp Weber, Khang Ho

Keywords: file, manager, comparison, study

Goals

Examine different file mangers and find out how they differ from each other
Find out whether different file managers are better suited for certain tasks than others
Carrying out studies to get information about what users, with different levels of expertise, think about the file managers and how they deal with them

Updates

Evaluation of the study (2019-03-08)

In this blog entry we present our results, which we use in our submission. Not every evaluation is included, only the combinations of varibales that we deemed to be important for our research got included. Different statistical tests were used. (more...)

Main Study (2019-01-31)

In this blog entry we will present our main study, what we exactly do and what information we got (without doing the final evaluation and analysis) (more...)

Study Design (2019-01-17)

This blog entry focuses on what we learned from the preliminary and what we used the data we gathered from it. It will also explain how we designed our study with the help of that data. (more...)

Contextual Inquiry and Preliminary Study (2019-01-03)

We had a one week break because of the holidays and not got back to working on the project. This blog post is about our first contextual inquiry and how we designed the preliminary study for our final user study of the project. (more...)

Methods and User Study (2018-12-13)

Our third bloq entry is introducing the different methods we are going to use for our user study. Contextual Inquiry, Expert Interviews and the KLM methods will be explained. Also a short introduction about our Preliminary Study will be shown. (more...)

Narrowing down the scope of the project and starting with first steps (2018-11-29)

This entry is about specifying our project and narrowing down the scope. This includes the literature reaseach, meetings with the project owner, creating the time table, as well as our first steps about the project. (more...)

Background and goals (2018-11-21)

This first entry is about the project in general, its background, the goals of it and serves as a status update of what we have done so far. (more...)

Further Resources

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