Attribute Objects

Validation level: 5. CHI, UIST, CSCW and TOCHI paper publication

The attribute object extend the notion of direct manipulation for touch interfaces. They consist of UI attributes that are objectified and that can be interacted with.

attribute objects drawing painting Drag-and-drop slide touch Direct manipulation touchscreen
Publications
Copy Bibtex Xia, H.; Araujo, B.; Grossman, T. and Wigdor, D. Object-oriented drawing. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 4610-4621, 2016.
Also featured in
Storyboard of Functions

The user taps on a shape to activate the menu with available attributes.

The user then taps on another shape, presses and holds on an attribute and then it drags it on top of the first shape to apply the same style.

The user drags the attribute list to show the styles that are not yet applied to the shape.

The user applies the shadow style by tapping on it.

Evaluation
Expert evaluation using a 7 points to 3 Linkert-scale.
Highlights:

The attributes of the objects are reified into objects that can be reused on multiple shapes.

Limitations:

Seems to be optimised for touch interfaces and although the authors point out how ti can be ported to mouse-keyboard interfaces, I'm a bit sceptical that it works as good as it does with touch.