New Perspectives in End-User Development

When end users approach a development task, they bring with them a set of techniques, expressions, and knowledge, which can be leveraged in order to make the process easier. The Natural Programming Project has been working for over twenty years to better understand how end users think about their tasks, and to develop new ways for users to express those tasks that will be more “natural,” by which we mean closer to the way they think. Our chapter in the previous book covered the first 10 years of this research; and here we summarize the most recent 10 years. This includes studies on barriers that impede EUD, and a new tool that helps with the understanding and debugging barriers by showing developers why their program has its current behavior. We also describe a tool that we created to help EUDs input, process, and transform data in the context of spreadsheets and web pages. Interaction designers are a class of EUDs that may need to program interactive behaviors, so we studied how they naturally express those behaviors, and then built a spreadsheet-like tool to allow them to author new behaviors. Another spreadsheet tool we created helps EUDs access web service data without writing code, and extends the familiar spreadsheet to support analyzing the acquired web-based hierarchical data and programming data-driven GUI applications. Finally, EUDs often need to engage in exploratory programming, where the goals and tasks are not well-formed in advance. We describe new tools to help users selectively undo past actions, along with on-going research to help EUDs create more efficient behaviors on smartphones and facilitate variations when performing data analysis.

What is end-user development (EUD) and when does a user become an end-user developer? Since the concept of EUD encompasses methods as well as practices of appropriating technology, it is not easy to answer these questions and several researchers already dealt with these issues. Within our chapter we suggest to conceptually extend our understanding of both EUD and the end user (developer). We draw on experiences we gained from past research exploring EUD in practice. We reflect upon the concepts of “gentle slope of complexity,” “tailoring languages” and “appropriation” which we situate within the broader concept of “infrastructuring.” We claim that EUD is given whenever an end user starts modifying the permanent aspects of an application (soft- or hardware) and, thus, starts climbing the tailorability mountain – or in our words, the tailorability staircase – and switching to a higher level to perform a specific practice. In our newly developed terminology this very moment, called “point of infrastructure,” is characterized by a break-down in the current practices which leads an end user to becoming an end-user developer.

This paper discusses the issues raised by the Internet of Things for end user development of interactive applications, and how they can be addressed. In such technological setting, applications have to adapt to various types of contextual events, which can be related to users, devices, environments, and social relationships. This calls for environments supporting the development of applications able to cope with dynamic sets of people, objects, devices, and services. The article discusses the characterizing concepts of such environments and their underlying motivations by analysing various solutions proposed to support them and their main design issues. We describe the relevant concepts and discuss how to make them understandable by people without programming experience. One result of this work is a design space, which identifies the main features that should be addressed to support Internet of Things applications using EUD approaches. Such a design space can be used as the basis for comparative discussion amongst various approaches. The analysis provided can also inform the design and development of new tools, and stimulate discussion on current research challenges.

Our contribution will review, analyze, discuss, and synthesize the research work done over the last 10 years exploring meta-design as a major framework for end-user development (EUD). The overriding perspective of our approach is grounded in the basic assumptions that (1) designers can prompt and support change in a community of practice, but they cannot predetermine it and (2) design and use mutually shape one another in iterative, social processes. The chapter argues and provides evidence that EUD should not be restricted to create new technologies but its most important and far-reaching impact will be to transform cultures by empowering all people to become active contributors in personally meaningful activities. The individual sections discuss and describe our basic framework, EUD applications in different domains, new conceptual developments that broadened the concept of meta-design, the identification of design trade-offs and drawbacks, and design guidelines. All of these activities have contributed to revisiting and broadening the meta-design framework for end-user development.

Meta-design has been proposed as a model to design systems able to support End-User Development (EUD). Meta-design means “design for designers.” Differently than in traditional design, professional developers do not directly create a final application, but they build software environments thorough which non-technical end users, acting as co-designers, are enabled to shape up the application while they are using it. Allowing end users to participate to the creation of their applications, by modifying or even creating from scratch software artifacts, is very challenging. To make this possible, end users have to be provided with software environments customized to their specific domain, which they can easily understand and use. In order to cope with domain specificity, this chapter presents a new meta-design model that specifically addresses the customization to a domain of interest. Customization, performed by domain experts possibly in collaboration with professional developers, becomes the key activity to provide non-technical end users with software environments that are adequate to their knowledge and needs, thus allowing them to actually become co-designers of their applications. The model is illustrated by describing its successful application to the design of a mashup platform that allows end users to create new applications by integrating data and functionality taken from different resources. The customization of the platform to different domains, such as Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning, is discussed.

Today, both businesses and public organizations need to be able to innovate and continuously develop their services and processes along with the underpinning IT infrastructure. We argue that End-User Development (EUD) becomes a necessary part of the innovation capability that underpins such service and process innovation. The book chapter presents a meta-analysis of two case studies. The analysis shows how the need for change in both cases brought about an organizationally established sustainable practice of EUD, where empowered employees cooperated with IT professionals in the development and evolution of an IT infrastructure based on flexible technologies. The chapter further discusses how such practices are supported by (participatory) organizational IT management structures and processes. Finally, it discusses how EUD in this way contributes to the innovation capability of the organization. The conclusion points to transferability of the insights gained and provides suggestions for future research.

This chapter discusses methodological choices facing researchers wishing to evaluate end user development technologies. While laboratory evaluations or short term evaluations are often conducted as a way to validate an end user development technology, these do not provide sufficient guarantees regarding the adoption of end user development practices and how systems should be improved to encourage such practices. The challenges pertaining to field deployments are discussed first at an operational level and second at a teleological level where we debate what should be success criteria for such studies. Discussing previous studies and our experiences from a deployment case in the healthcare sector, we propose guidelines for the evaluation of EUD technologies.

One area of research in the end-user development area is known as end-user software engineering (EUSE). Research in EUSE aims to invent new kinds of technologies that collaborate with end users to improve the quality of their software. EUSE has become an active research area since its birth in the early 2000s, with a large body of literature upon which EUSE researchers can build. However, building upon these works can be difficult when projects lack connections due to an absence of cross-cutting foundations to tie them together. In this chapter, we advocate for stronger theory foundations and show the advantages through three theory-oriented projects: (1) the Explanatory Debugging approach, to help end users debug their intelligent assistants; (2) the GenderMag method, which identifies problems with gender inclusiveness in EUSE tools and other software; and (3) the Idea Garden approach, to help end users to help themselves in overcoming programming barriers. In each of these examples, we show how having a theoretical foundation facilitated generalizing beyond individual tools to the production of general methods and principles for other researchers to directly draw upon in their own works.

Theories have an important role to play in research areas whose application faces rapid technological changes. They can provide longer-term intellectual references that shape deeper investigations and contribute to consolidate the identity of such research areas. A recent survey of EUD-related work published between 2004 and 2013 suggests that our field is remarkably techno-centered and could increase its scientific impact by diversifying some of its research approaches and practices. In this paper we show concrete examples of how Semiotic Engineering, originally a semiotic theory of human-computer interaction, can provide a unified theoretical framing for various EUD-related topics of investigation. Our contribution to the collection of chapters in this book is to demonstrate this particular theory’s potential as a catalyst of new kinds of transdisciplinary debate, as well as a source of inspiration for new breeds of technological developments.

The amount of data being available is increasing rapidly. Based on the technological advances with mobile and ubiquitous computing, the use of social media is getting more and more usual in daily life as well as in extraordinary situations, such as crises. Not surprisingly, this increasing use is one reason why data on the internet is also developing that fast. Currently, more than 3 billion people use the internet and the majority is also registered with social media services such as Facebook or Twitter. While processing this kind of data by the majority of non-technical users, concepts of End-User Development (EUD) are important. This chapter researches how concepts of EUD might be applied to handle social big data. Based on foundations and an empirical pre-study, we explore how EUD can support the gathering and assessment process of social media. In this context, we investigate how end-users can articulate their personal quality criteria appropriately and how the selection of relevant data can be supported by EUD approaches. We present a tailorable social media gathering service and quality assessment service for social media content, which has been implemented and integrated into an application for both volunteers and the emergency services.

We explore the relationship of end-user development (EUD) and learning in a case study informed by a new conceptual framework (evolving artifacts). The case is an online distance education program for training in-service teachers in special education in the 3D virtual world Second Life (SL). The “box,” a specific building block in the SL environment became a multipurpose tool for EUD in the study. The professor of the course designed the learning environment by creating and combining 3D boxes and then used boxes as containers to share course materials to the class. Some of the in-service teachers created boxes to personalize their learning activity. The conceptual framework for analysis integrates EUD concepts and concepts from sociocultural and constructivist learning theories (duality of learning; adaptation). We present an analysis of the participants’ spoken utterances and turn taking around the use of the boxes through the lens of two different EUD and learning situations (technology-adaptation and knowledge-adaptation). We show how participants take up these features to become engaged in the activity. One of the situations required the learners to adopt EUD techniques (technology-adaptation), and the professor used EUD techniques to enable knowledge-adaptation.

End-User Development (EUD) is a topic that finds application in varied domains but so far it has only been marginally considered in digital games research. However, there are several games that would benefit from a EUD approach, in particular for those games designed for a purpose other than entertainment, such as learning or training. These processes are permeated by large individual variation; as a consequence, the teacher must have a control over the game to use it like any other educational resource. In this chapter we present the state of the art in research on EUD for serious games from academic and industrial perspectives. We discuss a case study investigating the design process and evaluation of the Actors’ Programming Environment (APE), a EUD tool for modelling the behaviour of Non-Player Characters (NPCs). Starting from the literature review and empirical experience gathered over a time span of two years, the chapter provides a set of guidelines for the design of EUD tools for serious games, reflecting on their importance and complexity. It concludes with a set of heuristics that may advance research in the topic.

In the IoT domain, communities of domain experts, having different skills in specific areas of endeavor, need effective and easy-to-use ways for managing physical devices and their data streams. The configuration of networks of sensors, the design of the business logic of IoT applications based on proper policies, and the visualization and analysis of relevant events can be successfully carried out if different competencies are brought into play. Starting from a definition of End-User Development designed around the pervasive requirements of IoT applications, we describe an End-User Development model and a related three-layered architecture used for the development of the SmartFit framework. SmartFit is designed to be used in non-professional sport teams and is constituted by three different environments, respectively for IoT Engineers, Coaches and Trainers, and Athletes.

This chapter presents Web Augmentation (WA) technologies as tools and techniques for end-user development. WA technologies differ from other web development technologies as they target at improving existing Web pages and not at creating new Web sites. These improvements can deeply alter the way users use and interact with Web sites. This chapter revisits the concept of WA and provides an overview of the main features that characterize WA technologies. This characterization is used to position and compare the various contributions that have been made in WA. To make things more concrete we provide an illustration of WA technology through a case study using a dedicated tool called WebMakeup. Despite all their advantages, WA technologies present some limitations that might result in challenges on the user side. These aspects are also presented and discussed, highlighting directions for future work in that domain.