About time: Temporality in interaction

Ever since the inception of the modern computer, researchers and designers alike have been interested in the effects of system delays on users. The current study was conducted in order to examine the most central issues to the field of temporality in interaction, and presents a consolidation of a selection of publications on the subject. A distinction between two types of interactive systems, discretionary and continuous, is proposed in order to situate previous studies by the system being studied. The type of control being exerted by users differs on a fundamental level between the two types, hence affecting the effects of delays. Furthermore, an experiment was conducted to examine the effects of constant, sub-second system delays in discretionary tasks using a digitalised version of the Trail Making Test (FR-TMT, Summala et al., 2008). The experiment yielded but one significant result in form of an improvement in user response time as delays were increased. The other results showed no significant positive or negative effect of increased delays. These results are indicative that the chosen delays do not have any detrimental effects on users, in accordance with the presently coined ’theory of task interruption’. This theory considers delays as either interruptive or non-interruptive and maintains that only delays that disrupt user work-flow are to be removed from interactive systems. The current study gives reason to why some delays can be positive to user interaction, or in themselves be informative of system status, and be an integral part of a feedback structure. Further research is needed before all aspects of system delays are fully understood. New ways of looking at delays and using them in system design, like predictability and predictivity, are becoming more prevalent, and may become the focus of research and temporal design in the near future.