Dwell-and-spring

Abstract

In graphical user interfaces, direct manipulation consists in incremental actions that should be reversible. Typical examples include manipulating geometrical shapes in a vector graphics editor, navigating a document using a scrollbar, or moving and resizing windows on the desktop. As in many such cases, there will not be any mechanism to undo them, requiring users to manually revert to the previous state using a similar sequence of direct manipulation actions. The associated motor and cognitive costs can be high. We argue that proper and consistent mechanisms to support undo in this context are lacking, and present Dwell-and-Spring, an interaction technique that uses the metaphor of springs to enable users to undo direct manipulations. A spring widget pops up whenever the user dwells during a press-drag-release interaction, giving her the opportunity to either cancel the current manipulation or undo the last one. The technique is generic and can easily be implemented on top of existing applications to complement the traditional undo command. Empirical evaluation shows that users quickly adopt it as soon as they discover it.

Clarifying and differentiating discoverability

“…However, rare exceptions exist of authors who consider how to alleviate this problem, although not always with explicit reference to the concept of discoverability. These considerations take the form of either attempting to make proposed novel interaction methods discoverable from the beginning [8,9,37,43,123] or improving the discoverability of existing features and input methods [43,72,81,82,111]. Additionally, existing designs are compared and evaluated [39,59,111], adapted design procedures are suggested [19] and study methodologies proposed [24,26] in an effort to improve discoverability.…”

“…For example, [8,9] introduced the novel undo mechanism Dwelland-Spring and considered whether users would discover the technique. They found a lower discovery rate than expected and concluded that there may be a trade off between the stronger feedforward required to improve discovery and the design aim of making the mechanism easy to discard.…”

“…[75] highlight how their study, investigating the impact of signifiers for specific interactions on the perception of affordances, does not measure discoverability as participants are introduced to all interaction methods in question previously. This, as well as the variance in approaches highlights the difficulty of studying discoverability, with some studies including only vague observational data [1,43], priming the participants towards discovery by giving them tasks that reveal visual signifiers [8] or telling participants about the presence of the targeted interaction method [43,75]. These concessions, which are likely made in an effort to gather relevant data, however do mean that some studies claiming to investigate discoverability, fail to do so.…”

StructGraphics: Flexible Visualization Design through Data-Agnostic and Reusable Graphical Structures

“…The band shows the trace of an ongoing manipulation to help users trace their edits and easily cancel them, e.g., by pressing ESC. Our implementation resembles the Dwell-and-Spring technique [8] and serves as the base for all tools in the sketcher (see Fig. 6) by coupling direct manipulation with crossing-based selection [7].…”