Synonyms
Desktop metaphor; Graphical interaction
Definition
The term direct manipulation was introduced by Shneiderman [2, 3] to describe user interfaces that offer the following desirable properties:
- 1.
Visibility of the objects and actions of interest
- 2.
Physical actions on the object of interest instead of complex syntax
- 3.
Effects of those actions that are rapid, incremental and reversible
Direct manipulation is generally associated with Graphical User Interfaces, although the above properties are also beneficial in interfaces where the user is working with text or numeric data. Direct manipulation has been most popularly applied in the “desktop metaphor” for managing disk files, a visual representation where the objects of interest are the user’s files, and they are therefore continuously presented on the screen. This was an improvement over disk operating system consoles in which file listings were only transient results of a directory listing command.
The currently most common...
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Recommended Reading
Hutchins EL, Hollan JD, Norman DA. Direct manipulation interfaces. In: Norman DA, Draper, editors. User centered system design, new perspectives on human-computer interaction. Hillsdale: S.W. Lawrence Erlbaum; 1986.
Shneiderman B. The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation. Behav Inf Technol. 1982;1(3):237–56.
Shneiderman B. Direct manipulation: a step beyond programming languages. IEEE Comput. 1983;16(8):57–69.
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Blackwell, A.F., Costabile, M.F. (2018). Direct Manipulation. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_134
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