Direct Manipulation

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...