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Countdown Timer Speed: A Trade-off between Delay Duration Perception and Recall

Published: 11 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We face delays in a variety of situations. They are either inevitable, e.g., due to system limits, or are intentionally added, e.g., advertisements. In many situations, a visual feedback is provided during the delay to manage expectations. This feedback is usually provided through progress bars, percentages, or countdowns, depending on design limitations such as screen size. In this article, we use 15-second delays and examine (a) how delays affect users’ decision-making and task satisfaction, and (b) how to manipulate time perception to reduce the negative consequences of delays. Experiment 1 (N=421) shows that faster countdowns increase task satisfaction and lead to more rational decisions in the subsequent task. In Experiment 2, we investigate the effect of countdown speed on delay perception and recall (N=531). We show that faster countdowns lead to shorter perceived delays, while the delay will be recalled as longer after the task. The opposite is obtained for slower countdowns. We also increased the countdown rate and found a limit for the effect of increased speed. Thus, designers have to trade-off between how delays are perceived at the moment of experience and how they are recalled. We discuss the implications of these findings for user interface design.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction  Volume 27, Issue 2
April 2020
174 pages
ISSN:1073-0516
EISSN:1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/3387916
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 11 March 2020
Accepted: 01 December 2019
Revised: 01 December 2019
Received: 01 September 2018
Published in TOCHI Volume 27, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Delay
  2. countdown
  3. delay perception
  4. duration recall
  5. feedback design
  6. impatience
  7. loading bars
  8. progress meters
  9. quality of service
  10. task satisfaction

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  • (2024)Exploring the effects of time pressure and distracting elements in an Augmented Reality game for emergency preparednessInternational Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104900114(104900)Online publication date: Nov-2024
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