Active progress bars : aiding the switch to temporary activities

Christophe Hurter (1, 2) , Benjamin Cowan (3) , Audrey Girouard (4) , Nathalie Riche (5)

1 LII - ENAC - Equipe Informatique Interactive
2 IRIT - Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse
3 School of Computer Science [Birmingham]
4 SITE - School of Information Technology and Engineering [Ottawa]
5 Microsoft Research [Redmond]

Can we design an interface to help people make use of the idle time spent looking at progress bars? We propose to augment progress bars with user-controlled functionalities facilitating the switch to temporary activities. We propose a taxonomy of waiting period contexts and possible temporary tasks, then report on participatory design sessions, and a follow-up survey. Finally we describe an early prototype of active progress bar and report a small controlled experiment used to identify the impact of the tool on primary task satisfaction. The findings suggest that Active Progress Bars lead to significantly higher satisfaction when compared to a control condition.

Mots clés: progress bars; participatory design; frustration; task switching

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Christophe Hurter, Benjamin Cowan, Audrey Girouard, Nathalie Riche. Active progress bars : aiding the switch to temporary activities. HCI 2012, 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Sep 2012, Birmingham, United Kingdom. pp xxx. ⟨hal-01022318⟩