Direct Manipulation
This week’s video lecture
topic was about direct manipulation. It was defined in the lecture as
continuous object representation and also actions and feedback. In video games
specifically my general interpretation of the subject is based on pressing buttons
on a game controller, or performing physical movements with today’s gaming
technology. When talking about actions and feedback in the introduction three
types were listed, they are rapid, reversible and incremental. What does this
mean to me? I usually try to think of video game examples from games that I’ve
played. When talking about rapid action and feedback I think of games like God
of War.
Now I do in fact bring this game
up a lot when talking about buttons and game interfaces. In all of the God of
War titles, when defeating the majority of the enemies are quick time events
where the player must press certain buttons based on a reaction time and
sometimes also have to rapidly press a button many times in order for a
specific action to occur. Recently playing God of War Ascension I had an issue
trying to defeat a certain boss where I had to rip its wings off by spinning
the analog sticks on the Playstation Dualshock controller. As I continued to
fail and retry I had been practising and gradually increasing my skill in
performing this action. This relates to the lecture again where it talks about
positive feelings for good user interfaces. Mastering the interface… once I defeated
this boss, whenever the same style of quick time event occurred I was able to
do it with ease. Now as I am near the end of the game I am quick to react to
hitting the buttons to defeat enemies and bosses.
Use in Non-Gaming
Software
Throughout
the lecture many topics regarding word processing and spreadsheets were also
brought up. Direct manipulation does not solely relate to gaming. Programs such
as Microsoft Word and even Excel take some time to master. A new user to
Microsoft Word may not notice that the icons at the top near the font section
can bold, underline or italicize text. With the older versions of Microsoft
Word, it was much harder to learn. Old fashioned people such as my own parents
have great difficulties today trying to use these programs. Whenever I would
ask my parents why they were having trouble, they would inform me that the
toolbar at the top of the program contained way too many small icons and
options for them to perform and this was quite overwhelming to them. In the
lecture there were also word processing technologies listed that do in fact
improve the overall user interaction. These include, spellcheck, dictionary and
thesaurus features. Visual aids such as the red and green underlines can
clearly help a user to correct their mistakes.
Problems with Direct
Manipulation
As stated in the lecture, spatial
or visual representations can sometimes be too spread out. This can relate to
what I mentioned before with my parents being confused with too many icons or
objects in the manipulation toolbar at the top of Microsoft Word. It does take
time to learn new programs and understand graphical representation because
sometimes they can be misleading. A lot of icons in Microsoft Word alone will
take some trial and error to gain learning, such as the line spacing and
indentation icons. I myself have mastered the ability to word process. Not too
brag, but I can type very quickly and have the ability to bold using keys
quickly rather than using a lot of mouse work. This brings up another
interesting point of there being a lot of different alternatives to performing
certain manipulations to things like words, letters and sentences in the word
processing world. Typing the commands directly is usually faster. When talking
about games and complex systems I think of a lot of MMORPG games. Whenever I watch
people playing World of Warcraft or games like League of Legends, I am confused
to the max about what’s going on and why there are so many different visible
icons and numbers popping up in every corner. If I were to play those games for
the first time I would probably suck really bad and be manually clicking things
slowly to try them out. Looking at some of my friends play the games, I just
see them clicking rapidly and pressing buttons almost robotically.
Principles of Direct
Manipulation
In the
lecture there were three principles of direct manipulation brought up. These
were touched upon briefly earlier in the lecture, where I brought up my God of
War example. That would relate mainly to the third principle of “rapid,
incremental and reversible actions whose effects on the objects of interest are
visible immediately”. The first principle is “continuous representations of the
objects and actions of interest with meaningful visual metaphors”. My
understanding of this brings up the Assassin’s Creed franchise immediately.
Why? Simply because of that crazy map that you have a billion icons
representing many different types of missions, treasures, and points of
interest. The visual representations are always seen in the top right corner of
your screen and you can access them almost at any time. This allows the player
to tackle things at their own pace and in my opinion was a good design decision
for the game series.
The second principle is “physical actions or presses of
labeled buttons instead of complex syntax”. To me it brings up the previous
example of Microsoft Word and excel again.
References:
[Assassins Creed: Brotherhood].Retrieved March 21, 2013,
from: URL: (http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/write.ign.com/6390/2011/03/acb_dlc1_1-600x337.png)
[God of War: Quicktime Event].Retrieved March 21, 2013,
from: URL: (http://static.gamesradar.com/images/mb/GamesRadar/us/Features/2010/10/Greatest%20evolutions/QTEGodofWar2--article_image.jpg)
[Microsoft Word Toolbar Icons].Retrieved March 21, 2013,
from: URL: (http://colemancountyinstitute.wikispaces.com/file/view/microsoft.jpg/146633399/microsoft.jpg)
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