Direct manipulation is a central theme in interface design and is treated in a separate encyclopedia entry (see this). Below, Direct manipulation is only briefly described.
The term direct manipulation was introduced by Ben Shneiderman in his keynote address at the NYU Symposium on User Interfaces (Shneiderman 1982) and more explicitly in Shneiderman (1983) to describe a certain �direct� software interaction style that can be traced back to Sutherlands sketchpad (Sutherland 1963). Direct manipulation captures the idea of �direct manipulation of the object of interest� (Shneiderman 1983: p. 57), which means that objects of interest are represented as distinguishable objects in the UI and are manipulated in a direct fashion.
Direct manipulation systems have the following characteristics:
Visibility of the object of interest.
Rapid, reversible, incremental actions.
Replacement of complex command language syntax by direct manipulation of the object of interest.