Tech Report HCIL-2005-29

Shneiderman, B., Bederson, B. (October 2005)
Maintaining Concentration to Achieve Task Completion
Proceedings of DUX 2005, no. 9. [Published Version]
HCIL-2005-29

When faced with a challenging goal, knowledge workers need to concentrate on their tasks so that they move forward toward completion. Since frustrations, distractions, and interruptions can interfere with their smooth progress, design strategies should enable users to maintain concentration. This paper promotes awareness of this issue, reviews related work, and suggests three initial strategies: Reduce short-term and working memory load, provide information abundant interfaces, and increase automaticity.