Abstract
Direct manipulation interfaces cover a range of interactions involving a variety of styles. An important first step in developing techniques for describing and implementing asynchronous interactive dialogues of the type found in direct manipulation environments is an understanding of the underlying interaction tasks viewed from a user perspective. This paper reviews previous attempts to classify interaction tasks, examines them in the context of the Macintosh environment and proposes a taxonomy of tasks. Particular attention is devoted to tasks involving repeated actions. It is shown that all tasks reduce to selection sub-tasks, which has implications for the types of tools and techniques needed to describe and implement direct manipulation interfaces. In particular it is suggested that the meneme model of Lean Cuisine (Apperley and Spence, 1989) which was developed in the context of menu systems, and is based on selectable representations of objects, could be extended to handle the other interactions of a direct manipulation interface.
Published Version
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