UXD740 – Week 5: Direct manipulation

24th October 2021 - edited 24th January 2022

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Direct manipulation involves the user's experience when controlling the object in their task. For example, the mouse trackpad, if you want to pull up the Notification Centre in a macOS, you swipe from just off the right side of the trackpad towards the left, and the notifications slide in the screen. The trackpad is a mini representation of the screen. Designing the interaction and notification centre this way has a more direct feel. Direct manipulation is about creating interfaces that have interactions that feel more direct. This gives the user time to think about the task they need to do rather than the actual interface.

Invisible interfaces

The goal of invisible interfaces is to make the interface between users and their tasks invisible. There are five critical tips for designing for this:

1. Know your user – To understand who you are designing for as invisibility means different things to different people.

2. Differentiate your user – Provide multiple ways to complete tasks for both laymen and professionals if you need to design for both. For example, using the menu tab to go to edit, copy. Or using keyboard shortcuts such as cmd c.

3. Let your interface teach – Let the interface teach your users. For example, having copy and paste shortcuts available in the Edit menu so that new users can see and learn.

4. Use affordances – designing elements to understand its purpose and use. For example, buttons are for pressing, switches are for switching. Use these expectations to make your interface more usable.

5. Talk to your user – Ask the users what they're thinking, what they expect, and design what they need.

Challenge activity

In the webinar, we discussed the importance of good and bad writing in research proposals. We referred to a research writing checklist to evaluate our writing. Some of the checklist points included:

• being precise, clear and straight to the point – removing extra unnecessary words

• make sentences short enough so that you can take a breath when reading out loud

• Do not include opinions or biased information unless it is backed up with evidence

• Ask, does the reader need to know this early on in the proposal?

• What is interesting about your proposal?

In groups of four, we pitched our ideas and listened to feedback from our peers. One feedback I received was the lack of users in my case studies. Initially, I had three, but this was insufficient to see good results and trends. I have now reconsidered this and changed my number of users to five to six. I will be reaching out to my peers and asking if anyone would like to participate in my sleep therapy case study.

References

Brown, C.P. 2021. Week 5: Invisible interfaces [online] Available at: <https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/910/pages/week-5-invisible-interfaces?module_item_id=55168> [Accessed 24 January 2022].

Brown, C.P. 2021. Week 5: Making Indirect Manipulation Direct [online] Available at: <https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/910/pages/week-5-making-indirect-manipulation-direct?module_item_id=55167> [Accessed 24 January 2022].