A common question in the daily business life is the duration of tasks. The supervisor needs to know a pretty good approximation on the estimated time needed for the following job. By assuming that the worker is a computer user it is a surprise that the computer can not really help the worker in answering that question since the computer does not know how long he/she worked on previous files. The following article would like to show a way on how to measure the duration of single files.

Current computer systems are still based on the WIMP paradigm from the beginning of the graphical user interface. The design requirements from that time changed a lot in relation to todays use of computers. In the beginning of the GUI the computer was standing besides the desk while most of the work was still done on paper. This role changed. But there are several tasks which were natural in the past but impossible today. One of these tasks is to simply annotate an email, webpage, layout, briefing etc. People print out their digital documents to simply highlight some words or write notes in the margin.

The idiom of files and folders is part of the daily computer experience. It proofed to be a very efficient and successful solution for file management. The concept of that system is from a time where the requirements for a file handling tool where quite different in comparison to today. There are some situations/tasks in which the very flexible system of files and folders creates an unnecessary redundancy which result in a time consuming and attention sucking interaction. One of these tasks is the documenting of received and send out files. In the real world everybody needs to organize the inbox and outbox in a consistent and effective manner. How is that realized in todays computer systems and does the idiom of files and folders do a good job here?

Listening to music is always a linear experience. There are only two events on how to change this linearity a) while a track gets played or b) after a track got played. This interrupting interaction is always a distraction of the current setting the user sets himself in. This article would like to suggest an enhancement on how the users could prepare upcoming interactions inside linear lists (i.e. playlists) in advance.

Web browser are a platform for displaying and interacting with remote media(Text/Audio/Visual). The problem with this audio and visual media is that the user has no easy way to retrieve information about the media items/clips. The visitor depends on the information the author provides on the web page. This article would like to suggest on how to display meta data for visual media objects inside a web browser.

Today people are interacting with the computer quite an amount of time a day. Thus more and more tasks of their given goals are realized inside the computer and this means that the interaction between these different tasks becomes more and more important. If the efficiency of switching between single tasks could be improved, the interaction with a system could result in much more satisfying user experience. This article would like to suggest a new window paradigm based on layers.

One of the main activities in the daily computer interaction is scrolling. This scrolling is as old as the Graphical User Interface and the popularity of the scroll-wheel shows how much attention this idiom has today. This article would like to adress an issue with the feedback of the scrolling interaction. By reading long text on screen readers get easily distracted right after the scrolling process begun. How could this issue be resolved?

Computers are popular. Computers are used by a variety of different people. Different people make different errors. Errors are something nobody likes. What do current computer systems with errors? They alert/inform the user about it. And what else?
This article would like to adress an issue with the current way on how alert/error dialogs are presented.