Avoiding Interruptions
To ensure that your Windows Media Center application creates a positive user experience, you should design your application to be sensitive to the user's intentions. For example, your application should avoid interfering when the user is watching TV or listening to music.
The user can elect to disable any application through Windows Media Center settings. If your application frequently interrupts the user or behaves in a way that the user does not like, the user may remove it entirely. Pick your interruptions carefully.
When the user is watching full-screen video, avoid displaying dialog boxes, even modeless ones.
Interrupting the user is an appropriate action only for certain types of events, such as events that have some amount of user anticipation associated with them, fulfillment is at hand, and the status change is not merely incremental. For example, if the user just rented a movie that will take a long time to download, it is appropriate to let the user know when the movie is ready. Similarly, if the user purchases six albums from a music-download service, it is appropriate to tell the user when the last of the albums has arrived.
Examples of situations in which the user should not be interrupted include the following:
- If the user purchases six albums, the application should not interrupt the user when each song arrives. These notifications would be too frequent.
- If the user orders an item, the application should not notify the user when the item leaves the shipper's warehouse. In this case, there is anticipation, but fulfillment is still a few days off.
- If one of the user's programs has been updated, the application should not ask the user whether to download an update. In this case, the notification is probably not important to the user yet.
Always err on the side of not interrupting the user, and do not assume that a message from your application is more important than the content the user is enjoying.
See Also