I think this is a fun thought experiment that is fundamentally a bad product idea.
When you pick up a physical object with your hands, you don't assume the heavier the object, the more important it is. Same with file size.
But if you pick up your carton of eggs every morning you'll know if you have enough left to make an omelette.
If you make a backups it would be nice feedback to feel it weigh about what you expected. When making room on a disk you could juggle a few folders to feel if they'll fit or not.
There was some advanced facility (nuclear reactor? particle accelerator?) that laid microphones near the machinery and put various speakers in the ceiling of the control room; helped precisely detect and pinpoint problems immediately.
That said I'll prefer just seeing the size of the file or folder in bytes as a number.
I'm personally more interested in feeling other system metrics, like network traffic or memory bandwidth.
I like the idea of being able to enter into BILLY MAYS MODE just by furiously typing.
I agree that providing something more tangible than just a number would be beneficial for some operations. But I think it would get annoying quickly. Having difficulty moving a "heavy" file is the opposite of a good user interface. Every manipulation should require as little mental and physical effort as possible. Apart from that, I can't apply force with my mouse — it just clicks.
I believe a purely visual approach could work well. For example: every file icon has the same front area (basically the rectangles we have now), but visually extends to the back with some sort of stylized 3D effect, according to file size. So a small text file looks like a thin sheet of paper, a 10MB file might look like it's made of thick cardboard, a 2GB video looks like a box with considerable depth. The scaling should probably be logarithmic, not linear, to work well with human perception.
So you want heavy files to be easier to move? :)
I do like the log-stack of paper concept.
Some kind of subtle smooth momentum effect on top of any motion, i.e. dragging, might work too. Also, when clicking to "grab" something, lighter things could jump up slightly more than heavier things.
It would be interesting to maximize dynamic details, as much as could be done, without the typical person noticing. Borderline subliminal feedback might be a useful design approach for providing richer feedback at the "feeling" level, without introducing distractions.
One conceptual issue I noticed with using it is that force touch requires pressure in the opposite direction of how I would understand weight and mass. It feels more like... I'm trying to think of a physical example, trying to force down something with buoyancy. I also expected the weight to affect how fast I needed to drag my finger, but once I exerted enough downward pressure, both heavy and light objects moved the same.
rtgfhyuj•2h ago