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.

1. An Experimental Analysis of
Undo in Ubiquitous Computing
Environments
Marco Loregian, Marco P. Locatelli
University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)

2. Outline
• Problem
• Experiment
• Results
• Ongoing and future work
• Conclusion

3. Undo
• Well known function of PC applications
• Allows to revert (the effects of) commands
• Applied to user actions
• Different strategies

4. What does “undo”
mean in ubicomp
environments?

5. 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

6. The experiment
• Introduction of the problem with a video-
scenario
• Multi-part survey