Direct manipulation through surrogate objects

Abstract

Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of Surrogate Interaction for a 2D vector editor. All interaction with the surrogate is forwarded to the shapes. ABSTRACTDirect manipulation has had major influence on interface design since it was proposed by Shneiderman in 1982. Although directness generally benefits users, direct manipulation also has weaknesses. In some cases, such as when a user needs to manipulate small, attribute-rich objects or multiple objects simultaneously, indirect manipulation may be more efficient at the cost of directness or intuitiveness of the interaction. Several techniques have been developed over the years to address these issues, but these are all isolated and limited efforts with no coherent underlying principle. We propose the notion of Surrogate Interaction that ties together a large subset of these techniques through the use of a surrogate object that allow users to interact with the surrogate instead of the domain object. We believe that formalizing this family of interaction techniques will provide an additional and powerful interface design alternative for interaction designers, as well as uncover opportunities for future research.

Dynamic Composite Data Physicalization Using Wheeled Micro-Robots

“…An example of mechanized direct manipulation is the brushing and rearrangement of parallel coordinates [81], where the axes are manipulated directly, but not the data points. Similarly, surrogate objects can be used to manipulate multiple objects in a visualization [49].…”

Investigating Direct Manipulation of Graphical Encodings as a Method for User Interaction

“…Bar chart O 5 Group the bars into one bar [39] O 6 Sort the bar chart [24,37] Merging the bars representing SUV and Wagon cars Sorting the bar chart in an ascending order Size Scatterplot O 7 Change the size of all points [21,37] O 8 Assign a data attribute to the size of points [37] Change the size of all data points, so that they are all equally bigger Assigning city mile per gallon attribute to the size of points Color Scatterplot O 9 Change the color of all points [37] O 10 Assign a data attribute to the color of all points [37] Changing the color of all points to red Assigning the cylinder attribute to the color of all points.…”

“…The visualization community has advocated for the need to design more natural and fluid interactions for data visualization tools [12]. A recent line of research investigates how to enable users to convey their intended operations by direct manipulation [41] of the graphical encodings used to represent the data (e.g., [3,7,10,13,18,20,21,29,31,33,35,37,42,43,47]). For example, DimpVis [20] allows users to directly interact with the length, angle and position of the visual representations, as a means for temporal navigation.…”

Critique of ‘files as directories: some thoughts on accessing structured data within files’ (1)

“…Nearer to programming, there are live and visual programming tools. Nearer to GUIs, there are macro systems and interaction techniques such as surrogate objects [8] and macro recording 6 , which respectively let users apply direct operations to groups of elements at once or store a sequence of operations as a repeatable command.…”