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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 847Cite as

Direct Manipulation

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Synonyms

Graphical interaction; Desktop metaphor

Definition

The term direct manipulation was introduced by Shneiderman [2,3] to describe user interfaces that offer the following desirable properties:

  1. 1.

    Visibility of the objects and actions of interest

  2. 2.

    Physical actions on the object of interest instead of complex syntax

  3. 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

  1. Hutchins E.L., Hollan J.D., and Norman D.A. Direct manipulation interfaces. In User Centered System Design, New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction, Norman, D.A. Draper (eds.). S.W. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986.

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  2. Shneiderman, B. The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation. Behav. Inf. Technol., 1:237–256, 1982.

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  3. Shneiderman, B. Direct manipulation: a step beyond programming languages. IEEE Comput., 16(8):57–69, 1983.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Alan F. Blackwell

  2. University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Maria Francesca Costabile

Authors
  1. Alan F. Blackwell
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  2. Maria Francesca Costabile
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Blackwell, A., Costabile, M.F. (2009). Direct Manipulation. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_134

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