Experience, World Leaders in Research-Based User. “Drag–and–Drop: How to Design for Ease of Use.” Nielsen Norman Group, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/drag-drop/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2020.
Drag- and Drop is a popular type of direct manipulation that is useful for grouping, reordering, moving or resizing objects. The first step for this process would be to make sure the item of interest is visible on the screen. Next, the user will select the item using the moue or touch gesture and while the item is still selected, the user will move it to the new desired location. Finally, the user will deselect the item and the process is complete. Drag- and-drop makes actions immediate and visible but can also be inefficient, imprecise and physically challenging resulting in errors. when using the drag- and- drop feature it is nice when a drag icon appears but unfortunately, the drag icons are not universal. in mouse-driven interfaces, cursors will change with these actions. to make this process as smooth as possible you need feedback when these actions are completed for example making the item you are grabbing look different when it is selected and dropped. it is also important that when you are moving an item around you see the background items moving around the selected one. Precise accuracy is challenging with drag and drop, having a magnetic effect can be helpful. Traditionally this process is used with a mouse but it can be made more accessible with keyboard accessibility, by using the tab key to grab and the space bar to drop. Touch screens make this process a little difficult so it is nice to ad haptics so you can feel that you have completed an action, it is also nice to have some unused space in the design so that it can account for the use of fingers.