Providing opportunity for direct action

As computer technology has evolved, we've moved from a very remote and symbolic…form of interaction, to more direct action.…In the early days, flipping switches to set binary values, and punching holes in…cards, required making decisions, and coding data, and then waiting hours, or even…days, to get the results.…We were very far removed from the information we were trying to understand.…The command-line interface, monitors, and terminals made things faster, and easier…to correct, but we were still working with abstract representations of…information and processes.…

The arrival of the graphical user interface, also called GUI, and the mouse…suddenly made it possible to interact more directly with meaningful…representations of information.…We could drag pictures into photo albums, and documents to the printer.…This was more like the real world, but we were still using a mouse out here to…click a button over there to make something else happened somewhere else.…Touch screens are getting us closer to direct action. We can now directly touch…