Inspired by Nathaneal Boehm I’ve been thinking about about implementing an alerting system that gradually gets louder. There are multiple dials to turn up, I suppose alerts could come more frequently, become larger, bolder and with a brighter and brighter background.
This would work if you’re asking for a specific action to be taken. And of course it can definitely be abused so hopefully the action is something beneficial to the user as well. If UX were a personal trainer, this would be one of the tools I’d use to get my users to exercise more.
Following on from the personal trainer idea, one place where this would be good is for OH&S software that’s designed to encourage you to take regular breaks.
However given the binary mode of the software I’ve seen it’s more “force” than encourage, which just serves to annoy people. So I can see this being a good application for progressive feedback like this. It might start out as an icon and tooltip in the system tray, suggesting you take a break … then if you ignore, it might start flashing, a bigger pop-up, an audio alert and then ONLY as a last resort will it lock your screen – however the software I’ve seen just skips all that and goes straight to locked screen. Fail.