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User Interface Design and Ergonomics - National Open University of ...

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The term direct manipulation was introduced by Ben Shneiderman in his keynote address<br />

at the NYU Symposium on <strong>User</strong> <strong>Interface</strong>s <strong>and</strong> more explicitly in Shneiderman (1983) to<br />

describe a certain ‘direct’ s<strong>of</strong>tware interaction style that can be traced back to Sutherl<strong>and</strong>s<br />

sketchpad. Direct manipulation captures the idea <strong>of</strong> “direct manipulation <strong>of</strong> the object <strong>of</strong><br />

interest”, which means that objects <strong>of</strong> interest are represented as distinguishable objects<br />

in the UI <strong>and</strong> are manipulated in a direct fashion.<br />

Direct manipulation systems have the following characteristics:<br />

Visibility <strong>of</strong> the object <strong>of</strong> interest.<br />

Rapid, reversible, incremental actions.<br />

Replacement <strong>of</strong> complex comm<strong>and</strong> language syntax by direct manipulation <strong>of</strong> the<br />

object <strong>of</strong> interest.<br />

Figure 10: The text-book example <strong>of</strong> Direct Manipulation, the Windows File Explorer,<br />

where files are dragged <strong>and</strong> dropped.<br />

Figure 11: The screen <strong>of</strong> one <strong>of</strong> the earliest commercially available direct manipulation<br />

interfaces called MacPaint.<br />

104

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