We sought out 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.

People

Christophe Hurter

Benjamen Cowan

Audrey Girouard

Nathalie Riche

Catherine Plaisant

Publications

poster

Active ProgressBar: Easing the Switch to Temporary Activities

Christophe Hurter, Benjamen Cowan, Audrey Girouard, Nathalie Riche

AVI: International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 2012

conference

Active Progress Bar: Aiding the switch to temporary activities

Christophe Hurter, Benjamen Cowan, Audrey Girouard, Nathalie Riche

BSC HCI: British Human Computer Interaction Conference, 2012

poster

Active Progress Bars: Facilitating the Switch to Temporary Activities

Christophe Hurter, Audrey Girouard, Nathalie Riche, Catherine Plaisant

CHI EA: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, 2011

[PDF] ACM DL Authorize service