An Experimental Analysis of Undo in Ubiquitous Computing Environments Marco Loregian , Marco P. Locatelli University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
Dec 01, 2014
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)