An experimental analysis of undo in ubiquitous computing environments

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. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.