D. M. Frohlich. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, chapter Direct Manipulation and Other Lessons, pages 463–488. Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, The Nederlands, second, completely revised edition edition, 1997.

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This chapter is a great literature review of direct manipulation, a class of graphical interfaces that allowed to be operated ‘directly’ using manual actions rather than typed instruction. Their main idea was to move interaction from dialogue to manipulation.

Schneiderman summarised direct manipulation in the following three principles:

1. continuous representation of the object of interest;

2. Physical actions or labelled buttons pressed instead of complex syntax;

3. rapid incremental reversible operations whose impact on the object of interest is immediately visible.

Hutchins et al. defined better what makes manipulation direct: directness equals engagement plus distance. Engagement refers to the locus of control of action within the system; distance refers to the mental effor reqired to trnaslate the goals into actions at the interface and then evaluate their effects.

The chapter reports a comparative review of the major studies concerning direct manipulation interfaces, dividing the studies in three groups: uncritical comparative evaluations; critical comparative evaluations; and naturalistic choice studies. In summary, the studies confirm some but not all of the proposed benefits of direct manipulation and show them to depend on implementation, task and measurement factors.

More recently, mised mode interfaces shifted the locus of the direct manipulation devate from whether direct manipulation is better than other forms of interaction to whn and how its benefits should be combined with other forms.

An interesting point is that the same kind of mixing of agent and model world attributes happens in a different way in computer mediated communication tools. In these cases the interface agents are other people who may act on a shared workspace or document whilst talking to you (Whittaker, Geelhoed, and Robinson, 1993).

Tags: human communication, human computer interaction, interaction design