Question

Choose a software system (or a web page) that you think will benefit the users if it employed the principles of direct manipulation. Illustrate some of the operations under the direct manipulation scheme

Answer 1

Direct manipulation is an interaction style in which the objects of interest in the UI are visible and can be acted upon via physical, reversible, incremental actions that receive immediate feedback.

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. 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.

The action of using your fingertips to zoom in and out of the image is an example of a direct-manipulation interaction. 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. Another classic example is dragging a file from a folder to another one in order to move it.

Moving a file on MacOS using direct manipulation involves dragging that file from the source folder and moving it into the destination folder.

• Continuous representation of the object of interest. Users can see visual representations of the objects that they can interact with. As soon as they perform an action, they can see its effects on the state of the system. 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. Thus, direct-manipulation UIs satisfy, by definition, the first usability heuristic: the visibility of the system status. In contrast, in a command-line interface, users usually must explicitly check that their actions had indeed the intended result (for example, by listing the content of the destination directory).