Much undo about nothing?: investigating why email retraction is less popular than apologizing

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the results of a user study we performed to investigate users' appreciation of undo for email, also called retract, and their perception of the involved interactions and functionalities. A Computer Assisted Web Interview (CAWI) has been conducted on a large set of email users and the results indicate that there is little knowledge of the possibility of retracting email messages even if current implementations meet user requirements. The results get significance from the fact that a large part of respondents declared to read their own messages also after having sent them, looking for possible mistakes.

REFERENCES

• 1: Gregory D. Abowd , Alan J. Dix, Giving undo attention, Interacting with Computers, v.4 n.3, p.317-342, Dec. 1992 [doi>10.1016/0953-5438(92)90021-7]
• 2: Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT). Le tecnologie dell'informazione e della comunicazione: disponibilità nelle famiglie e utilizzo degli individui -- Anno 2007. http://www.istat.it Published: January 16^th, 2008.
• 3: Locatelli, M. P. and Loregian, M. 2008. Undo in Context-aware Collaborative Ubiquitous-Computing Environments. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (Catania, Italy, September 18--19, 2008). Badica, C. et al., Eds. IDC 2008, vol. 162 of SCI, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany, 263--268.
• 4: Marco Loregian, Undo for mobile phones: does your mobile phone need an undo key? do you?, Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: building bridges, October 20-22, 2008, Lund, Sweden [doi>10.1145/1463160.1463190]
• 5: Marco Loregian , Marco P. Locatelli, An Experimental Analysis of Undo in Ubiquitous Computing Environments, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, June 23-25, 2008, Oslo, Norway [doi>10.1007/978-3-540-69293-5_40]
• 6: S. Scher and J. Darley. How Effective Are the Things People Say to Apologize? Effects of the Realization of the Apology Speech Act. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(1):127--140, 1997.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
cooperation, email, undo, usability, user study