Welcome!
Thanks to everyone who came to today’s 1st reading group meeting. We had lively discussion of today’s reading on direct manipulation interfaces:
E.L. Hutchins, J.D. Hollan, and D.A. Norman, “Direct manipulation Interfaces”, in User centered system design, D. A. Norman and S. W. Draper Eds., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 87-124, 1985. http://hci.ucsd.edu/120/direct-manip.pdf
Adobe Photoshop came up more than once in our discussion as it displays both the strengths (everything at hand) and weaknesses (visual clutter) of direct manipulation interfaces. This week the Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop relayed on his blog attempts by Adobe to make the interface for Photoshop workable for experts and novices alike:
With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces. Today if a user walks up to Photoshop and says, “What do I do?,” the app kind of shrugs, stubs out a cigarette, and says, “I dunno–you tell me.” That’s not real cool, and we can do better.
Looking forward to reading everyone’s posts and comments!
HCI Reading Group 
Thanks for setting up the blog! I think it’ll be a good way to continue discussion on the subject, especially since I had to duck out early to get to class today. Of course, there’s this other blog I have to set up, not two days after I created my own personal blog on BlogSpot…
One of the best examples of direct manipulation I remember is back from when I used to design levels for a computer game called Half-life, one of those 3-D first-person shooter games. I used a program called Quark to do this. Basically, what you did was you added building blocks to the level, then you resized the blocks the way you wanted by dragging handles on the blocks. Granted, tasks like setting up the textures and lighting and scripting were done using dialog boxes and stuff, but just creating the level geometry was done really well. In particular, there was a 3-D view where you could actually go through your level, and change anything simply by clicking on it within the 3-D view and dragging it. Not only was this a lot more useful than the standard 2-D view, since you could see exactly how it looked, but it also gave a lot of satisfaction. It really felt like you were reshaping your world as you chose, and that’s quite an important part. I think direct manipulation is pretty key to creative software, especially relating back to our 500 readings on tools that help with human expression and creativity rather than just strict automation of tasks.
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation 🙂 Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Glamourous.