Active progress bars : facilitating the switch to temporary activities

Christophe Hurter (1, 2) , Audrey Girouard (3) , Nathalie Riche (4) , Catherine Plaisant (5)

1 LII - ENAC - Equipe Informatique Interactive
2 IRIT - Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse
3 Human Media Lab
4 Microsoft Research [Redmond]
5 Human Computer Interaction Lab

In this paper, we seek to find a better way of effective task management when a progress bar interrupts user's primary activity. We propose to augment progress bars with user controlled functionalities facilitating the switch to temporary activities. We detail a taxonomy of waiting period contexts and possible temporary tasks, then report on 5 participatory design, and a follow-up survey of 96 respondents. Finally we describe an early prototype of active progress bars, and report on initial use.

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

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

Christophe Hurter, Audrey Girouard, Nathalie Riche, Catherine Plaisant. Active progress bars : facilitating the switch to temporary activities. CHI EA 2011, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2011, Vancouver, Canada. pp 1963-1968, ⟨10.1145/1979742.1979883⟩. ⟨hal-01022469⟩