Reverse a prior action, absorbing the anxiety of mistakes and encouraging confident exploration.
Structure
- Trigger
- Feedback
- Scope
Levels: single-action vs. multiple levels of undo
Whether undo can be applied only once or successively.
Linear vs. non-linear undo
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Single-action undo: Reverses only the most recent action.
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Multi-action undo: Allows reversing multiple actions sequentially.
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Selective undo: Allows to pick a specific action from a history to undo, without affecting subsequent actions.
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Regional undo: Enables undoing operations within specific regions or contexts
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Branching models: Creates tree-like structures where actors can explore alternative paths
Collaboration
TODO:
To-do
Related pattern to capture: version history, a more durable counterpart to undo’s transient reversal, navigating named past states rather than stepping back through recent actions.
Resources & references
Consequences
- a reverse path that returns the structure to its prior state, with a window in which the retraction is offered
Related patterns
Enacts
- Temporality — lets the actor reverse an action after the fact, loosening commitment over time
Complements
- Change review — rejecting a proposed change is recovery moved before the commit
- Regeneration — restores what a regeneration replaced
- Transient feedback — the dismissal window doubles as the recovery window — transient feedback is the primary carrier for undo affordances
- Wizard — mitigates the high commitment level by allowing reversal of completed steps
Alternatives
- Approval gate — consent before the act and recovery after it are the two ends of one safeguard ladder
- Inline confirmation — moves the safety net after the act instead of before it; prefer undo when the action reverses cleanly
Related
- Abort — related non-destructive exit; offer undo and restore affordances when state has been modified
- Action consequences — the strongest severity reducer — recovery after the act removes the need for confirmation before it
- Saving — Reversibility in saved states
- Status feedback — provides immediate feedback on the undo action
- Command menu — can be used to access undo options
- Activity log — displays a history of actions that can be undone
Preceded by
- Settings — enables reversal of settings changes, particularly valuable for exploratory configuration
- Deletion — the data is gone; whether that holds is now a question of recovery — a completed deletion is exactly the state undo acts on
- Editing in place — changes commit one at a time — the short gap between act and effect is what makes the result feel caused by the gesture — so there is no assembled set to review and no pending state to cancel from; taking something back happens after the fact
- Wizard — the corridor removes peripheral vision: the actor can't compare across steps or jump to the one they know they need, so a change of mind partway has to be able to walk backwards without discarding the sequence