Monitoring and evaluation of time delay

In general, users act as if their behavior is controlled by a self-regulatory system (Carver & Scheier, 1998) during user-system interaction. The self-regulatory system is specified as a feedback control mechanism consisting of monitoring, evaluation, and action adjustment mechanisms. This article investigates whether perception processes take care of monitoring, and if a user's evaluation is based on the interpretation of the results of such monitoring. To do this, a typical system property, time delay, was manipulated. In an experiment, the relation between estimated task duration and actual time-to-task completion was studied. The findings support the premise that perception processes, interpreted as a monitoring mechanism, can keep track of physical task time. A monotonic, positive relation was found between the time-to-task completion and user satisfaction, which supports the assumption that objective efficiency influences the evaluation of interaction. A linear relation between the estimated duration and user satisfaction indicates that the monitoring mechanism transforms physical signals into a format that can be used in the evaluation process, thereby changing the internal reference frame of the evaluation mechanism.