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Folder navigation is the main way that personal computer users retrieve their own files. People dedicate considerable time to creating systematic structures to facilitate such retrieval. Despite the prevalence of both manual organization and navigation, there is very little systematic data about how people actually carry out navigation, or about the relation between organization structure and retrieval parameters. The aims of our research were therefore to study users' folder structure, personal file navigation, and the relations between them. We asked 296 participants to retrieve 1,131 of their active files and analyzed each of the 5,035 navigation steps in these retrievals. Folder structures were found to be shallow (files were retrieved from mean depth of 2.86 folders), with small folders (a mean of 11.82 files per folder) containing many subfolders (M=10.64). Navigation was largely successful and efficient with participants …