Active Progress Bar: Aiding the switch to temporary activities

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.