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Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Albrecht Schmidt, Richard Atterer
Bridging Waiting Times on Web Pages
In MobileHCI '12: Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM SIGCHI's International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. San Francisco, CA, USA, September 12-24, 2012. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 305-308. ISBN 978-1-4503-1105-2. (bib)

High-speed Internet connectivity makes browsing a convenient task. However, there are many situations in which surfing the web is still slow due to limited bandwidth, slow servers, or complex queries. As a result, loading web pages can take several seconds, making (mobile) browsing cumbersome. We present an approach which makes use of the time spent on waiting for the next page, by bridging the wait with extra cached or preloaded content. We show how the content (e.g., news, Twitter) can be adapted to the users interests and to the context of use, hence making mobile surfing more comfortable. We compare two approaches: in time-multiplex mode, the entire screen displays bridging content until the loading is finished. In space-multiplex mode, content is displayed alongside the requested content while it loads. We use an HTTP proxy to intercept requests and add JavaScript code, which allows the bridging content from websites of our choice to be inserted. The approach was evaluated with 15 participants, assessing suitable content and usability.