How do I determine whether the user is waiting on a program?

We've got a requirement to determine whether the user is waiting on a program to do something. The biggest issue I see here is, if I monitor user activity (Keyboard and Mouse) then I'll assume the user is waiting when they might be reading, thinking, on the phone, etc.

Sometimes, if I kno开发者_如何学Pythonw I'm going to have to wait a long time on a process (like booting up), I'll go get a coffee whilst it loads. I'm not really waiting on any one program, I'm just being efficient with my time.

I'm open to any ideas, even requesting the user use a key or key-combination to indicate they're waiting.

Is there a way to determine whether a user is waiting on a program?

Give the user the illusion that they could do the next step of interaction, i.e. don't tell them right away that the previous action has not completed. Then, when they try do something, you'll notice that they really would like to do something now and hence are waiting if they can't.

In some cases, you may find that what they want to do can actually be done right away, despite the previous action still being in progress.

You can't tell what a non-interacting user is doing. They could be day dreaming and you'd have no idea if they were waiting on the computer or not.

You might be able to deduce from user interaction that a user was waiting when you see no activity during a period of time when disk and or CPU usage is high. But this is not a scientific measure, it's merely an indicator. The assumption that the user was waiting negates the possibility to use the results for meaningful measurements.