Welcome to the "Understanding User Comfort" Project Website!

We are engaged in a research program that is trying to measure and model user comfort with resource borrowing, a commonly used technique in distributed computing. The results of our work, however, could be applied in many different ways to make computer systems less annoying to users.

As we are measuring user comfort, we need users! We ask you to participate in a user study. To participate, you install a small program on your Windows computer that emulates resource borrowing. The program places an icon in your tray. Whenever you are discomforted by the slowness of your computer, you simply click on that icon or press a keystroke combination to return the borrowed resources. You can stop participating and remove or disable the program at any time.

Check out the FAQ and Papers pages to learn more about the project.