A progress bar is a graphical control element used to visualize the progression of an extended computer operation, such as a download, file transfer, or installation. Sometimes, the graphic is accompanied by a textual representation of the progress in a percent format. The concept can also be regarded to include "playback bars" in media players that keep track of the current location in the duration of a media file.
A more recent development is the indeterminate progress bar, which is used in situations where the extent of the task is unknown or the progress of the task cannot be determined in a way that could be expressed as a percentage. This bar uses motion or some other indicator (such as a barber's pole pattern) to show that progress is taking place, rather than using the size of the filled portion to show the total amount of progress, making it more like a throbber than a progress bar. There are also indeterminate progress indicators, which are not bar shaped.
The concept of a progress bar was invented before digital computing. In 1896 Karol Adamiecki developed a chart named a harmonogram, but better known today as a Gantt chart. Adamiecki did not publish his chart until 1931, however, and then only in Polish. The chart thus now bears the name of Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed his chart around the years 1910–1915 and popularized it in the west.
Adopting the concept to computing, the first graphical progress bar appeared in Mitchell Model's 1979 Ph. D. thesis, Monitoring System Behavior in a Complex Computational Environment. [1] In 1985, Brad Myers presented a paper on “percent-done progress indicators” at a conference on computer-human interactions. [2]
Myers' research involved asking people to run database searches, some with a progress bar and some without. Those who waited whilst watching a progress bar described an overall more positive experience. Myers concluded that the use of a progress bar reduced anxiety and was more efficient. [3]
Typically, progress bars use a linear function, such that the advancement of a progress bar is directly proportional to the amount of work that has been completed. However, varying disk, memory, processor, bandwidth and other factors complicate this estimate. Consequently, progress bars often exhibit non-linear behaviors, such as acceleration, deceleration, and pauses. These behaviors, coupled with humans' non-linear perception of time passing, produces a variable perception of how long progress bars take to complete. [4] This also means that progress bars can be designed to "feel" faster.
Sometimes, to show the progress of a particularly long-taking operation such during program installation or when copying many files at once, applications resort to showing two progress bars at once, one for the operation as a whole, and the other to indicate the progress of identified sub-tasks such as the installation of a single component or the copying of an individual file.
Finally, the graphical design of progress bars has also been shown to influence humans' perception of duration. [5]
Fitts's law is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. The law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was initially developed by Paul Fitts.
A Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. It was designed and popularized by Henry Gantt around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationships between activities and the current schedule status.
Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents, web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks and fulfill a person's various roles ; it is information management with intrapersonal scope. Personal knowledge management is by some definitions a subdomain.
Henry Laurence Gantt was an American mechanical engineer and management consultant who is best known for his work in the development of scientific management. He created the Gantt chart in the 1910s.
In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus, pointer", denoting a style of interaction using these elements of the user interface. Other expansions are sometimes used, such as substituting "mouse" and "mice" for menus, or "pull-down menu" and "pointing" for pointer.
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
In artificial intelligence, an embodied agent, also sometimes referred to as an interface agent, is an intelligent agent that interacts with the environment through a physical body within that environment. Agents that are represented graphically with a body, for example a human or a cartoon animal, are also called embodied agents, although they have only virtual, not physical, embodiment. A branch of artificial intelligence focuses on empowering such agents to interact autonomously with human beings and the environment. Mobile robots are one example of physically embodied agents; Ananova and Microsoft Agent are examples of graphically embodied agents. Embodied conversational agents are embodied agents that are capable of engaging in conversation with one another and with humans employing the same verbal and nonverbal means that humans do.
In computing, post-WIMP comprises work on user interfaces, mostly graphical user interfaces, which attempt to go beyond the paradigm of windows, icons, menus and a pointing device, i.e. WIMP interfaces.
The task-focused interface is a type of user interface which extends the desktop metaphor of the graphical user interface to make tasks, not files and folders, the primary unit of interaction. Instead of showing entire hierarchies of information, such as a tree of documents, a task-focused interface shows the subset of the tree that is relevant to the task-at-hand. This addresses the problem of information overload when dealing with large hierarchies, such as those in software systems or large sets of documents. The task-focused interface is composed of a mechanism which allows the user to specify the task being worked on and to switch between active tasks, a model of the task context such as a degree-of-interest (DOI) ranking, a focusing mechanism to filter or highlight the relevant documents. The task-focused interface has been validated with statistically significant increases to knowledge worker productivity. It has been broadly adopted by programmers and is a key part of the Eclipse integrated development environment. The technology is also referred to as the "task context" model and the "task-focused programming" paradigm.
Susanne Boll is a Professor for Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. and is a member of the board at the research institute OFFIS. She is a member of SIGMM and SIGCHI of the ACM as well as the German Informatics Society GI. She founded and directs the HCI Lab at the University of Oldenburg and OFFIS.
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".
Steve Whittaker is a Professor in human-computer interaction at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is best known for his research at the intersection of computer science and social science in particular on computer mediated communication and personal information management. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and winner of the CSCW 2018 "Lasting Impact" award. He also received a Lifetime Research Achievement Award from SIGCHI, is a Member of the SIGCHI Academy. He is Editor of the journal Human-Computer Interaction.
Brad Allan Myers is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and became its Director in 2023. He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto in 1987, under Bill Buxton.
Social visualization is an interdisciplinary intersection of information visualization to study creating intuitive depictions of massive and complex social interactions for social purposes. By visualizing those interactions made not only in the cyberspace including social media but also the physical world, captured through sensors, it can reveal overall patterns of social memes or it highlights one individual's implicit behaviors in diverse social spaces. In particular, it is the study “primarily concerned with the visualization of text, audio, and visual interaction data to uncover social connections and interaction patterns in online and physical spaces. ACM Computing Classification System has classified this field of study under the category of Human-Centered Computing (1st) and Information Visualization (2nd) as a third level concept in a general sense.
Victoria Bellotti is a Senior CI researcher in the Member Experience Team at Netflix. Previously, she was a user experience manager for growth at Lyft and a research fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center. She is known for her work in the area of personal information management and task management, but from 2010 to 2018 she began researching context-aware peer-to-peer transaction partner matching and motivations for using peer-to-peer marketplaces which led to her joining Lyft. Victoria also serves as an adjunct professor in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at University of California Santa Cruz, on the editorial board of the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing and as an associate editor for the International Journal of HCI. She is a researcher in the Human–computer interaction community. In 2013 she was awarded membership of the ACM SIGCHI Academy for her contributions to the field and professional community of human computer interaction.
Lorraine Borman is an American computer scientist associated with Northwestern University who specializes in information retrieval, computational social science, and human–computer interaction. She was one of the founders of SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery, and became its first chair.
Social navigation is a form of social computing introduced by Paul Dourish and Matthew Chalmers in 1994, who defined it as when "movement from one item to another is provoked as an artifact of the activity of another or a group of others". According to later research in 2002, "social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources" to guide users in the information space, and that it is becoming more difficult to navigate and search efficiently with all the digital information available from the World Wide Web and other sources. Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.
Wendy Elizabeth Mackay is a Canadian researcher specializing in human-computer interaction. She has served in all of the roles on the SIGCHI committee, including Chair. She is a member of the CHI Academy and a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced grant. She has been a visiting professor in Stanford University between 2010 and 2012, and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2014.
Andrew Cockburn is currently working as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is in charge of the Human Computer Interactions Lab where he conducts research focused on designing and testing user interfaces that integrate with inherent human factors.
Personality computing is a research field related to artificial intelligence and personality psychology that studies personality by means of computational techniques from different sources, including text, multimedia, and social networks.