tools-only Instrumental Interaction: An Interaction Model for Designing Post-WIMP User Interfaces
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon Department of Computer Science University of Aarhus Aabogade 34 DK-8200 Aarhus N — Denmark mbl@dai.mi.au.dk
Open Access support provided by Aarhus University
Conference: CHI ’00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, The Hague, The Netherlands, April 1–6, 2000 Sponsors: SIGCHI Published: 01 April 2000 ISBN: 1581132166 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/332040.332473 (https://doi.org/10.1145/332040.332473) PDF: 332040.332473.pdf Total Citations: 382 Total Downloads: 6917
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Abstract
This article introduces a new interaction model called Instrumental Interaction that extends and generalizes the principles of direct manipulation. It covers existing interaction styles, including traditional WIMP interfaces, as well as new interaction styles such as two-handed input and augmented reality. It defines a design space for new interaction techniques and a set of properties for comparing them. Instrumental Interaction describes graphical user interfaces in terms of domain objects and interaction instruments. Interaction between users and domain objects is mediated by interaction instruments, similar to the tools and instruments we use in the real world to interact with physical objects. The article presents the model, applies it to describe and compare a number of interaction techniques, and shows how it was used to create a new interface for searching and replacing text.
Keywords
Interaction model, WIMP interfaces, direct manipulation, post-WIMP interfaces, instrumental interaction
Introduction
In the early eighties, the Xerox Star user interface [27] and the principles of direct manipulation [26] led to a powerful graphical user interface model, referred to as WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointing). WIMP interfaces revolutionized computing, making computers accessible to a broad audience for a variety of applications.
In the last decade, HCI researchers have introduced numerous new interaction techniques, such as toolglasses [5] and zoomable user interfaces [3]. Although some have been shown to be more efficient than traditional techniques, e.g., marking menus [19], few have been incorporated into commercial systems. A likely reason is that integrating new interaction techniques into an interface is challenging for both designers and developers. Designers find it faster and easier to stick with a small set of well-understood techniques. Similarly, developers find it more efficient to take advantage of the extensive support for WIMP interaction provided by current development tools.
The leap from WIMP to newer “post-WIMP” graphical interfaces, which take advantage of novel interaction techniques, requires both new interaction models and corresponding tools to facilitate development. This paper focuses on the first issue by introducing a new interaction model, called Instrumental Interaction, that extends and generalizes the principles of direct manipulation to also encompass a wide range of graphical interaction techniques.
The Instrumental Interaction model has the following goals:
Cover the state-of-the-art in graphical interaction techniques.
Provide qualitative and quantitative ways to compare interaction techniques, to give designers the basis for an informed choice when selecting a given technique to address a particular interface problem.
Define a design space in which unexplored areas can be identified and lead to new interaction techniques.
Open the way to a new generation of user interface development tools that make it easy to integrate the latest interaction techniques in interactive applications.
After a review of related work, this paper analyzes the limits of current WIMP interfaces. The Instrumental Interaction model is introduced and applied to several existing interaction techniques as well as to the design of a new interface for searching and replacing text. Finally the paper concludes with suggestions for future work.
Related Work
In this paper, an interaction model is defined as follows: An interaction model is a set of principles, rules and properties that guide the design of an interface. It describes how to combine interaction techniques in a meaningful and consistent way and defines the “look and feel” of the interaction from the user’s perspective. Properties of the interaction model can be used to evaluate specific interaction designs.
Direct Manipulation [26] is a generic interaction model, while style guides, e.g., Apple’s guidelines [2], describe more precise and specific models. Took introduced a model called Surface Interaction [29] and Holland & Oppenheim a model called Direct Combination [15].
An interaction model differs from the architectural model of an interface, which describes the functional elements in the implementation of the interface and their relationships (see [12] for a review). User interface development environments have generated a variety of implementation models for developing interfaces (see [24] for a review), e.g. the widget model of the X/Motif toolkit [14] or Garnet’s Interactors model [23]. MVC [18] is a well-known model that was created to support the Xerox Star user interface and has influenced many other architectural and implementation models. Whereas architectural models are aimed at interface development, an interaction model is aimed at interface design.
The model-based approach and its associated tools [28] help bridge the gap between interaction and architectural models by offering a higher-level approach to the design of interactive systems.
Device-level models such as logical input devices [11] or Card et al.’s taxonomy [7] operate at a lower level of abstraction than interaction models. Understanding the role of the physical devices in interaction tasks is a critical component of the definition of the Instrumental Interaction model.
At the theoretical level, Activity Theory [6] provides a relevant framework for analyzing interaction as a mediation process between users and objects of interest.
Finally, Instrumental Interaction is grounded in the large (and growing) number of graphical interaction techniques that have been developed in recent years, some of which are referenced in the rest of this article.
From WIMP to Post-WIMP Interfaces
The WIMP interaction model can be outlined as follows:
Application objects are displayed in document windows.
Objects can be selected and sometimes dragged and dropped between different windows.
Commands are invoked through menus or toolbars, often bringing up a dialog box that must be filled in before the command’s effect on the object is visible.
This section uses Shneiderman’s principles of direct manipulation [26] to analyze WIMP interfaces:
- Continuous representation of objects of interest
Objects of interest are central to direct manipulation. They are the objects that the user is interested in to achieve a given task, such as the text and drawings of a document or the formulae and values in a spreadsheet. Principle 1 asserts that objects of interest should be present at all times. Since objects of interest are often larger than the screen or window in which they are displayed, WIMP interfaces makes them accessible at all times through scrolling, panning or zooming. This accessibility is hindered by the growing number of interface objects that are not objects of interest such as toolbars, floating palettes and menu bars. These use increasing amounts of screen real-estate, forcing the user to shrink the windows displaying objects of interest. Dialog boxes also often occlude significant parts of the screen, making the rest of the interface inaccessible to the user.
Finally, there are more objects of interest than meet the eye: in many applications users must manipulate secondary objects to achieve their tasks, such as style sheets in Microsoft Word, graphical layers in Adobe Photoshop or Deneba Canvas, or paint brushes in MetaCreations Painter. Once the user is familiar with the application, these objects become part of his or her mental model and may acquire the status of object of interest. Unfortunately, these are rarely implemented as first-class objects. Thus, for example, Word’s styles are editable only via transient dialog boxes that must be closed before returning to the text editing task.
- Physical actions on objects vs. complex syntax
Most computers have only a mouse and keyboard as input devices limiting the set of user actions to: typing text or “special” keys (e.g. function keys, keyboard shortcuts and modifiers), pointing, clicking, and dragging. Given the mismatch between this small vocabulary of actions and the large vocabulary of commands, WIMP interfaces must rely on additional interface elements, usually menus and dialog boxes, to specify commands. The typical sequence of actions to carry out a command is:
Select the object of interest by clicking it.
Select a command from a menu or keyboard shortcut.
Fill in the fields of a dialog box.
Click the OK button to see the result.
This is conceptually no different from typing a command in a command-line interface: The user must type a command name, file name (the object of interest), arguments (the fields in the dialog box) and return key (the OK button). In both cases the syntax is complex and cannot be considered direct manipulation of the objects of interest. In fact, WIMP interfaces directly violate principle 2 and often use indirect manipulation of the objects of interest, through (direct) manipulation of interface elements such as menus and dialog boxes.
- Fast, incremental and reversible operations with an immediately-apparent effect on the objects of interest
The heavy graphical syntax imposed on the user results in commands that are neither fast nor incremental. Specifying a command is not fast because of the amount of time used for non-semantic actions such as displacing windows and flipping through tabs in a tabbed dialog. Inputting parameter values for a command is often inefficient because of the small set of interactors, such as when numeric values are entered as text. Finally, the specification is not incremental: users must explicitly commit to a command that uses a dialog box before seeing the result. If the result does not match the user’s expectations, the whole cycle of command activation must be started over again. This is especially cumbersome when trial-and-error is an integral part of the task, as when a graphics designer selects a font size: specifying the point size numerically is annoying when the goal is to see the visual result on the page.
- Layered or spiral approach to learning
The small number of interaction techniques used by WIMP interfaces makes it easy to learn the basics of any new application. However, interaction shortcuts, such as combining keyboard modifiers with mouse buttons to activate the frequent commands, are concealed and inconsistent across applications and make the transition from novice to power user more difficult.
Towards a new interaction model
Some commercial applications, especially those dedicated to creative tasks such as painting, graphic design or music, extend the basic WIMP model to address some of the shortcomings identified above. For example, some painting programs make brushes first class objects that can be edited and saved into files. Some text editors have inspector windows that display the state of the current selection and update it when the user enters relevant values. Techniques such as the HotBox [21] were designed to access larger numbers of commands.
These new interaction techniques illustrate the transition from WIMP to post-WIMP interaction: Windows are not used in zoomable interfaces, icons and text are replaced by richer representations in interactive visualization, menus are complemented by more powerful interaction widgets such as toolglasses, pointing and dragging are superseded by bimanual input and gesture input. Designing post-WIMP interfaces that are more faithful to the principles of direct manipulation and that take advantage of novel interaction techniques requires new interaction models. To guide interface designers, these models should be:
Descriptive, incorporating both existing and new applications.
Comparative, providing metrics for comparing alternative designs (as opposed to prescriptive, deciding a priori what is good and what is bad).
Generative, facilitating creation of new interaction techniques.
Instrumental Interaction
As shown in the previous analysis, WIMP interfaces do not follow the principles of direct manipulation. Instead, they introduce interface elements such as menus, dialog boxes and scrollbars that act as mediators between users and the objects of interest. Users have a (limited) sense of engagement, as advocated by direct manipulation, because they manipulate these intermediate objects directly. This matches our experiences in the physical world: We rarely fingerpaint, but often use pens and pencils to write. We cook with pots and pans, hang pictures with hammers and power drills, open doors with handles and turn off lights with switches. Our interaction with the physical world is governed by our use of tools. Direct manipulation of physical objects of interest occurs when we bring them into our current context of operation, before we manipulate them with the appropriate tools, usually with two hands [13].
The Instrumental Interaction model is based on how we naturally use tools (or instruments) to manipulate objects of interest in the physical world. Objects of interest are called domain objects, and are manipulated with computer artifacts called interaction instruments.
Domain objects
In computer systems, applications operate on data that represent phenomena or objects. For computer users, this data is the primary focus of their actions. For example, when creating a text document, the focus of the user is on the text of the document. Everything else on the screen is there to support the user’s task of editing the text document.
Domain objects form the set of potential objects of interest for the user of a given application. Domain objects have attributes that describe their characteristics. Attributes can be simple values or more complex objects. For example, in a 3D modeller, the position and size of a sphere are simple values (integer or real numbers), while the material of the sphere is a complex entity (color, texture, transparency, etc.). The user may shift the object of interest, concentrating on the material as the focus of the interaction. Similarly, text styles that describe the formatting attributes of text also may also obtain the status of objects of interest. Materials and styles are therefore also domain objects in their respective interfaces.
In summary, domain objects form the basis of the interaction as well as its purpose: Users operate on domain objects by editing their attributes. They also manipulate them as a whole, e.g. to create, move and delete them.
Interaction instruments
An interaction instrument is a mediator or two-way transducer between the user and domain objects. The user acts on the instrument, which transforms the user’s actions into commands affecting relevant target domain objects. Instruments have reactions enabling users to control their actions on the instrument, and provide feedback as the command is carried out on target objects (Figure 1).
A scrollbar is a good example of an interaction instrument. It operates on a whole document by changing the part that is currently visible. When the user clicks on one of the arrows of the scrollbar, the scrollbar sends the document a scrolling command. Note that the transduction here consists of sending scrolling commands as long as the user presses the arrow. The reaction of the scrollbar consists of highlighting the arrow being pressed. The feedback consists of updating the thumb to reflect the new position of the document. In addition, the object also responds to the instrument by updating its view in the window.
Another example is an instrument that creates rectangles in a drawing editor. As the user clicks and drags the mouse, the instrument provides a reaction in the form of a rubber-band rectangle. When the user releases the button, the creation operation is actually carried out and a new domain object is created. The feedback of this operation consists in displaying the new object.
An instrument decomposes interaction into two layers: the interaction between the user and the instrument, defined as the physical action of the user on the instrument and the reaction of the instrument; and the interaction between the instrument and the domain object, defined as the command sent to the object and the response of the object, which the instrument may transform into feedback to the user. The instrument is composed of a physical part, the input device, and a logical part, the representation of the instrument in software and on the screen.
Figure 1: Interaction instrument mediating the interaction between a user and a domain object.
Activating instruments
At any one time, an interface provides a potentially large number of instruments. However the user can manipulate only a few of them at the same time, usually only one, because of the limited number of input devices. In the most common case of a keyboard and mouse, a single input device (the mouse) must be multiplexed between a potentially large number of instruments, i.e. a single physical part may be associated with different logical parts.
An instrument is said to be activated when it is under the user’s control, i.e. when the physical part has been associated with the logical part. In the case of the scrollbar, the user activates the instrument by pointing at it and it remains active as long as the pointer is within the scrollbar. When creating a rectangle, the user activates the instrument by clicking a button in a tool palette and it remains active until another instrument is activated.
These two types of activation are quite different. The activation of the scrollbar is spatial because it is caused by moving the mouse (and cursor) inside the area of the scrollbar. The activation of the rectangle creation instrument is temporal because it is caused by a former action and remains in effect until the activation of another instrument. (This is traditionally called a mode). Each type of activation has an associated cost: Spatial activation requires the instrument to be visible on the screen, taking up screen real-estate and requiring the user to point at it and potentially dividing the user’s attention. Temporal activation requires an explicit action to trigger the activation, making it slower and less direct.
Interface designers often face a design trade-off between temporal and spatial multiplexing of instruments because the activation costs become significant when the user must frequently change instruments. Using extra input devices can reduce these costs. For example, the thumbwheel on Microsoft’s Intellimouse is a scrolling instrument that is always active. An extreme example is an audio mixing console, which may contain several hundred potentiometers and switches, each corresponding to a single function. This permits very fast access to all functions, which is crucial for sound engineers working in real-time and cannot afford the cost of activating each function indirectly. A large design space lies between a single mouse and hundreds of potentiometers, posing design challenges to maximally exploit physical devices and reduce activation costs.
Reification and meta-instruments
Reification is a process for turning concepts into objects. In user interfaces, the resulting objects can be represented explicitly on the screen and operated upon. For example, a style in a text editor is the reification of a collection of text attributes; the notion of material in a 3D modeller is the reification of a set of rendering properties. This type of reification generates new domain objects such as styles and materials that complement the “primary” domain objects of the application domain.
Instrumental Interaction introduces a second type of reification: an interaction instrument is the reification of one or more commands. For example, a scrollbar is the reification of the command that scrolls a document. This link between the traditional notion of command and the notion of instrument makes it easy to analyze existing interfaces with the Instrumental Interaction model. It is also a useful guideline to identify instruments when designing a new interface. In the last part of this paper, this rule is used to reify the traditional search-and-replace command of a text editor into a search instrument.
The result of this reification rule is that instruments are themselves potential objects of interest. This is indeed the case in real life, when the focus of attention shifts from the object being manipulated to the tool used to manipulate it. For example a pencil is a writing instrument and the domain object is the text being written. When the lead breaks, the focus shifts to a new instrument, a pencil sharpener, which operates on the shifted domain object, the pencil lead. The focus may even shift to the pen sharpener, if we need a screwdriver to fix it. Such “meta-instruments” (instruments that operate on instruments) are not only useful for “fixing” instruments, but can also be used to organize instruments in the workspace, e.g. a toolbox, or to tailor instruments to particular tasks, e.g. turning a power drill into a power saw. In graphical user interfaces, common meta-instruments include menus and tool palettes used to select commands and tools, i.e. to activate instruments.
Properties of instruments
An important role of an interaction model is to provide properties to evaluate and compare alternative designs. This can help interface designers who face difficult choices when selecting the interaction techniques for a particular application. The goal of defining properties of instruments is not to decide which instruments are good and which are bad, but to evaluate them so that designers can make an informed choice and so that researchers can identify and explore areas of the design space that are not mapped by existing instruments.
The literature on user interface evaluation techniques is considerable. Here, we use a particular type of evaluation based on properties. This is a common approach in software engineering and has also proved valid and useful for evaluating interactive systems [12]. The rest of this section introduces three properties of interaction instruments.
Degree of indirection
The degree of indirection is a 2D measure of the spatial and temporal offsets generated by an instrument. The spatial offset is the distance on the screen between the logical part of the instrument and the object it operates on. Some instruments, such as the selection handles used in graphical editors, have a very small spatial offset since they are next to or on top of the object they control. Other instruments, such as dialog boxes, can be arbitrarily far away from the object they operate on and therefore have a large spatial offset. A large spatial offset is not necessarily undesirable. For example, placing a light switch far from the light bulb it controls makes it easier to turn on the light. Similar examples can be found in user interfaces.
The temporal offset is the time difference between the physical action on the instrument and the response of the object. In some cases, the object responds to the user’s action in real-time. For example, clicking an arrow in a scrollbar scrolls the document while the mouse button is depressed. In other cases, the object responds to the user’s action only when the action reaches closure. For example, the arguments specified in a dialog box are taken into account only when the OK or Apply button is activated. In general, short temporal offsets are desirable because they exploit the human perception–action loop and give a sense of causality [22].
Figure 2: Degree of indirection — spatial vs temporal offsets across instruments; continuum between direct and indirect manipulation.
Degree of integration
The degree of integration measures the ratio between the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) provided by the logical part of the instrument and the number of DOFs captured by the input device. This term comes from the notion of integral tasks [17]: some tasks are performed more efficiently when the various DOFs are controlled simultaneously with a single device. A scrollbar is a 1D instrument controlled by a 2D mouse, therefore its degree of integration is 1/2. The degree of integration can be larger than 1: controlling 3 rotation angles with a 2D mouse [16] has a degree of integration of 3/2. This property can be used to compare instruments that perform similar operations.
For example, panning over a document can be achieved with two scrollbars or a 2D panner. The latter has a degree of integration of 1 and is therefore more efficient than two scrollbars, which have a degree of integration of 1/2 and incur additional activation costs.
Degree of compatibility
The degree of compatibility measures the similarity between the physical actions of the users on the instrument and the response of the object. Dragging an object has a high degree of compatibility since the object follows the movements of the mouse. Scrolling with a scrollbar has a low degree of compatibility because moving the thumb downwards moves the document upwards. Using text input fields to specify numerical values in a dialog box, e.g. the point size of a font, has a very low degree of compatibility because the input data type is different from the output data type. Similarly, specifying the margin in a text document by entering a number in a text field has a lower degree of compatibility than dragging a tab in a ruler.
Applying the Model
This section uses the Instrumental Interaction model to analyze existing interaction techniques, both from WIMP interfaces and from more recent research. It demonstrates the descriptive power of the model. The generative power of the model is then illustrated by the design of a new instrument for searching and replacing text.
Analyzing WIMP interfaces
The primary components of WIMP interfaces can be easily mapped to instruments and compared:
Menus and toolbars are meta-instruments used to select the command or tool to activate. This use of meta-instruments slows down interaction and generates shifts of attention between the object of interest, the meta-instrument and the instrument. Contextual menus have a small spatial offset and are therefore more efficient than toolbars and menu bars. Toolbars, which can be moved next to their context of use, have a better spatial offset than menu bars.
Dialog boxes are used for complex commands. They have a high degree of spatial and temporal indirection. They often use a small set of standard interactors such as text fields for numeric values, resulting in a low degree of compatibility.
Inspectors and property boxes are an alternative to dialog boxes that have a lower degree of temporal indirection. Since they can stay open, they can be activated with pointing (positional activation) rather than selection in a menu (temporal activation).
Handles are used for graphical editing and provide a very direct interaction: low degree of indirection, high degree of compatibility and good degree of integration.
Window titles and borders are instruments activated positionally to manipulate the window (move, resize, iconify, zoom, close). Scrollbars control the content of the window. Because of their low degree of integration, they are not optimal, especially for panning documents in 2D. Also, their spatial offset generates a division of attention, especially since they are activated positionally: the user must be sure to point at the right part of the scrollbar.
Keyboard shortcuts and accelerator keys are meta-instruments, used to quickly switch between instruments and save the activation costs of menus and toolbars. Some accelerator keys affect the way the current instrument works. For example, on the Macintosh, the Shift key constrains the move tool to horizontal and vertical moves and the resize tool to maintain the current aspect ratio.
Drag and drop is a generic instrument for transferring or copying information. Compared to traditional cut/copy/paste commands that use a hidden clipboard, it has a smaller degree of indirection. There is no spatial offset because the objects are manipulated directly and the temporal offset is low because there is feedback about potential drop-zones as the user drags the object.
Over the past few years, interaction techniques such as inspectors, property boxes, drag and drop and contextual menus have become more common in commercial applications. The above analysis explains why these techniques are more efficient than their WIMP counterparts, demonstrating a useful contribution of the Instrumental Interaction model.
Analyzing post-WIMP interaction techniques
Interactive visualization helps users explore large quantities of visual data and make sense of it through filtering and displaying it to exhibit patterns [8]. These systems use two categories of instruments:
Navigation instruments specify which part of the data to visualize and how.
Filtering instruments specify queries and display results.
A key aspect of these systems is a strong coupling between user actions and system response. In other words, these instruments must have a small temporal offset ; any parameter change updates visualization immediately, often with smooth animations that preserve perceptual continuity.
Zoomable user interfaces (e.g., infinite canvases) require pan/zoom instruments that are temporally activated and available anywhere, yielding high compatibility and integration versus positional scrollbars. Droppable local tools collocate instruments with content, removing meta‑instrument overhead. Bimanual paradigms (toolglasses) keep a meta‑instrument under the non‑dominant hand while the dominant hand acts through it on domain objects, enabling concurrent navigation and editing. Graspable/AR interfaces externalize instrument logic into physical artifacts, maximizing compatibility and integration by operating in the real world.
Designing a Text Search Instrument 
The conventional modal dialog enforces serial, system‑prompted decisions with high temporal offset. The proposed non‑modal instrument provides:
Immediate highlighting of all matches in text and as tick marks on the scrollbar.
Click‑to‑replace with instant feedback; per‑occurrence arbitrary undo via re‑click.
Replace‑string edits that propagate to all replaced occurrences.
Continuous recomputation of matches as the document changes.
Scrollbar rate control: vertical pointer distance modulates speed/direction; reduces attention division and raises integration/compatibility.
Variants: multiple simultaneous search instruments with distinct highlight colors; multi‑string queries and regex replacements for workflows like indexing, leveraging global visibility to avoid near‑duplicate inclusions.
Property effects: reduced spatial offset (no Next/Previous/Replace buttons), reduced temporal offset (immediate visualization and effects), increased integration (rate control uses continuous DOF), increased compatibility (joystick‑like mapping).
Conclusion and Future Work 
Instrumental Interaction generalizes Direct Manipulation by treating commands as reified instruments acting on first‑class domain objects, supplying comparative properties (indirection, integration, compatibility) that describe a continuum from indirect to direct manipulation and a generative design space. Future work: deeper analyses of graphical techniques, additional evaluative properties, taxonomies of instruments, exploration of the design space, and principles for instrument creation/integration. A toolkit grounded in the model would aid developers in adopting novel techniques and accelerate the shift from WIMP to post‑WIMP interfaces.
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