Does your mobile phone need an undo key?
The other day I deleted a note on my iTouch. I hit the little bin icon and just as I unthinkingly hit the red “delete note”, suddenly realised that I had not copied the phone number it contained – too late. That’s when it hit me that, contrary to a mental model acquired from long and intimate acquaintance with PCs, I did not have a recycle bin on the “phonetop” from which to retrieve the deleted note. Confusingly though, the application uses a bin icon to represent the “delete” action.
Discussing this with other users, I found out that actually, on the latest generation iPhones and iTouch, if you delete text within a note by mistake, you can retrieve it by vigorously shaking your device – this brings up a dialogue box with the option to “undo typing” or “cancel”…but this is far from being intuitive, and is not written in any user manual – which in any case most users tend to ignore, especially with Apple products.
Another instance where mental models acquired from manipulating data within a business productivity application do not apply in the mobile world, is the “undo” functionality. Deleting a text message from your mobile phone, or a phone number from your contacts, is final. You don’t get a second chance.
Since Nielsen’s usability heuristics suggest that error recovery should be easy, it would seem this is a usability flaw of mobile devices. In fact, there has been some research(2) into the “undo for mobile” idea, with a survey indicating that while at least some users do not see “undo” as applying to phone calls, many users would indeed like an “undo” option. With the current generation of smart phones and mobile devices increasingly used for text editing, email and so on, I suspect more and more users will be asking for it.
What do you think – do you miss your recycle bin and “undo” arrow on your mobile?
(2) ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 358
Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges
Lund, Sweden
SESSION: Full papers
Pages: 274-282
Year of Publication: 2008
ISBN:978-1-59593-704-9