Pick Up And Drop

MergeMe with DragAndDropSucks? Or refactor DragAndDropSucks so that it doesn't overlap so much with PickUpAndDrop?

DragAndDropSucks because it requires fine motor skills and intense focus as well as being an extremely rigid and inflexible feature which delivers very suboptimal utility.

Many of the problems of DragAndDrop can be ameliorated in a number of ways. First, by using haloed target areas. Second, by snapping the mouse to object haloes. Third, by providing a ZoomableUserInterface, so you don't have to hardcode the size of objects. Fourth, by providing a meaningful system-wide undo.

But a better way, something that fixes the underlying problem of drag and drop, is to use pick up and drop. Why is it better? Because after you've picked up an object, you don't have to worry about losing or dropping it accidentally; it requires a deliberate act to do so.

Additionally, because you completely separate the pick up and drop actions, you no longer need to clutter the user's focal area (the mouse pointer) with whatever it is they picked up. Since that area is now uncluttered, it's easier to use auto-highlighting on target mouse-over.

So using pick up and drop, you move the mouse over an object, click to pick it up, at which point it gets visibly sucked into the objects stack in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. The object picked up shows up as a miniature in the objects stack with a coloured halo that corresponds to the new colour of the mouse pointer halo. Now you move the mouse over to the target area, and once on a targetable area the target gets backlit using some suitable highlight colour, which tells you that you're in the target area. At that point, you can choose to drop the picked up object into the target area or you can lose it (pop the stack without dropping the object) using deliberate actions.

In a well-designed system, it would also be possible to provide object-jumping navigation using keyboard keys. So the QWE-XWC would jump the mouse pointer to the nearest object along the designated directions. This works only if you've killed manual placement of objects but happily manual placement is itself idiotic, see AutomaticVsManualPlacement. Note that this feature shouldn't work in conjunction with drag and drop because drag and drop requires holding down the mouse button while dragging. While a person may theoretically use both the mouse and the keyboard simultaneously, the cognitive load is much too high for this to be practical. This feature has a much higher cognitive load than panning in first person shooter games.

Note that Pick Up and Drop is not the same as Pick and Drop which is limited to styluses used in a groupware context. Pick Up and Drop is the generalization of Pick and Drop, although it originated independently. So far, the only reference google finds for Pick Up and Drop is http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-April/msg00056.html though there is at least one article out there on the subject.

CategoryUserInterface