Getting Attention

In this 6 page article I demonstrate various techniques an application can get the attention of a user from multiple cues. Techniques include displaying a simple message, flashing the title bar, displaying an icon in the system tray and audio cues. For a 16 page Journal, this was quite an extensive article.

On a typical business day, computer users would be running multiple programs simultaneously. This maximises efficiency whereby a user would be doing work in one application while waiting for a different application to finish processing some sort of transaction. Some software companies have adapted this behaviour into their applications whereby the program would signal the user when a large request had finished processing or there had been a change of state in the program.