In Version 2.3 of Energy2D, I have added full support of undo/redo for most actions. With this feature, you can undo all the way back to your starting point and redo all the way forward to your latest state. This is not only a must-have feature for a design tool with a reasonable degree of complexity, but also a simple — yet powerful — mechanism for reliably collecting very fine-grained data for understanding how a user interacts with the software.

Why are we interested in collecting these action data?

From the perspective of software engineering, these action data provide first-hand information for quality assurance (QA). QA engineers can analyze these data to measure the usability of the software, to identify behavior patterns of users, and to track results from version to version to gauge if an adjustment has led to better user experience.

From the perspective of education and training, these action data encode users’ cognitive processes. Any interaction with the software, especially with a piece of highly visual and responsive software like Energy2D, is automatically a process of cognition. A fundamental thesis in learning science is to understand how we can design interactive materials that maximize learning for all students. These precious fine-grained action data may hold an important key to that understanding.

This idea of using the stack of actions stored in the undo manager of a piece of software to record and replay the entire process of interaction is a unique feature that has been implemented in our Energy2D and Energy3D software and proven a non-obtrusive, high-fidelity, and low-bandwidth technique for data collection.