Thus, direct-manipulation UIs satisfy, by definition, the first usability heuristic: the visibility of the system status. For example, when moving a file using drag-and-drop, users can see the initial file displayed in the source folder, select it, and, as soon as the action was completed, they can see it disappear from the source and appear in the destination - an immediate confirmation that their action had the intended result. As soon as they perform an action, they can see its effects on the state of the system. Users can see visual representations of the objects that they can interact with. Continuous representation of the object of interest.In his analysis of direct manipulation, Shneiderman identified several attributes of this interaction style that make it superior to command-line interfaces:
The Characteristics of Direct Manipulation These interfaces combine menu-based interaction with physical actions such as dragging and dropping in order to help the user use the interface with minimal learning. Moving a file in a command-line interface involves remembering the name of the command (“mv” in this case), the names of the source and destination folders, as well as the name of the file to be moved.ĭirect manipulation is one of the central concepts of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and is sometimes equated with “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG). In command-line interfaces, the user must remember the system label for a desired action, and type it in together with the names for the objects of the action.
Moving a file on MacOS using direct manipulation involves dragging that file from the source folder and moving it into the destination folder.ĭefinition: Direct manipulation (DM) is an interaction style in which users act on displayed objects of interest using physical, incremental, reversible actions whose effects are immediately visible on the screen.īen Shneiderman first coined the term “direct manipulation” in the early 1980s, at a time when the dominant interaction style was the command line. Another classic example is dragging a file from a folder to another one in order to move it.
The action of using your fingertips to zoom in and out of the image is an example of a direct-manipulation interaction. What do you do? Something like this? On a mobile phone you can pinch out to zoom into an image and pinch in to zoom out. Let’s say that you’re looking at an image of yourself on a roller coaster and want to see if your terrified expression has been caught on camera.
0 kommentar(er)
