The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation†

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Abstract
This paper suggests three motivations for the strong interest in human factors' aspects of user interfaces and reviews five design issues: command language versus menu selection, response time and display rates, wording of system messages, on-line tutorials, explanations and help messages and hardware devices. Five methods and tools for system development are considered: participatory design, specification methods, software implementation tools, pilot studies and acceptance tests and evolutionary refinement based on user feedback. The final portion of the paper presents direct manipulation, an approach which promises to become widely used in interactive systems. Direct manipulation involves representation of the object of interest, rapid incremental reversible actions and physical action instead of complex syntax.

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