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An Experimental Analysis of Undo in Ubiquitous Computing Environments, paper presented at UIC08, by Marco Loregian and Marco P. Locatelli All personal computer application are provided with an undo functionality, which can implement any of the models available in literature. Users are generally aware of what the undo function is expected to do, depending on the application in use. Ubiquitous computing systems are beginning to be understood and deployed in real life situations, but little attention has been paid to what users expect themselves to be able to do and undo in such systems. In this paper, we present the results of a survey we made to evaluate the perception of undo mechanisms with respect to a simple ubiquitous-computing environment. Our study shows that users already have a complex vision of undo encompassing advanced features such as context awareness and compensation.
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An Experimental Analysis of Undo in Ubiquitous Computing
Environments
Marco Loregian, Marco P. LocatelliUniversity of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
Outline
• Problem
• Experiment
• Results
• Ongoing and future work
• Conclusion
Undo
• Well known function of PC applications
• Allows to revert (the effects of) commands
• Applied to user actions
• Different strategies
What does “undo” mean in ubicomp environments?
The problem
• We need to know it in order to design usable (successful) systems
• How should we find it out?
• Undo is a user intention
• We surveyed potential users
The experiment
• Introduction of the problem with a video-scenario
• Multi-part survey
The video
Available on Google Video: “Dude, where is my ctrl-z?”http://video.google.it/videoplay?docid=1025487561314098360
The survey
• Demographics
• What if you were the user?
• What if you were the system?
• How much would it be acceptable to… (17 items)
• Summary of the operations
The results
• Demographics
• Analysis of the applied undo strategies
Full stats are in the paper
Demographics
64%
36%
Gender
M F
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46
Age
Mostly university students (psychology)
Analysis
• Users had very different ideas about what undo should be like
• We tried to highlight shared opinions, and to find the factors influencing divergent opinions
• Different preferences = different strategies to be available for being chosen
• Do strategies in literature still apply?
Some hypotheses
• System as a mediator between humans? No, better if not intrusive
• Degree of autonomy?It depends, but must be known in advance by the user
• Collect context information?Yes, but never violate users’ privacy
0
5
10
15
20
Linear Selective Other
Undo strategy implicitly applied by participants#
par
ticip
ants
Analysis according to the definitions in literature
Non-Smart Smart
No Compensation 33% 6%
Compensation 17% 44%
50%
61%
Undo strategy implicitly applied by participants
So what?
• Ubicomp systems must be provided with context-aware, smart (semi-proactive) undo functions, with compensation mechanisms
• It’s not easy! It’s not only a (serious) usability problem
• Designers: keep the problem in mind and interact with users
• Developers: deal with the problem
Ongoing Work
• Undo for
• context-aware collaborative ubiquitous computing environments[to appear at IDC’2008, sept.]
• mobile phones[to appear at NordiCHI 2008, oct.]
• email[in preparation]
Future Work
• Prototyping with the CASMAS framework
• Find scenarios
• Analyze undo in place
• Implement
• Test
Conclusionundo!undo!undo!
Even Homer knows that undo is important!
Thank you!
An Experimental Analysis of Undo in Ubiquitous
Computing EnvironmentsMarco Loregian, Marco P. LocatelliUniversity of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
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