End-User Development

Designers can never anticipate all future uses of their system. Meta-design theory emphasizes that systems should therefore be designed to adapt to future conditions in the hands of end users. As our technological environments increase in complexity, designers must provide the flexibility for users to shape their technologies. This paper describes a series of experiments, from a laboratory study to a digital library design exercise, exploring the use of meta-design inspired guidelines as design heuristics in an iterative, participatory design process. The meta-design inspired guidelines were found to help designers and end users shift the types of design ideas generated towards building features supporting end-user customization and modification in use. While true meta-design systems are highly complex, we intend to demonstrate that “discount” methods at design-time can help to shift design thinking towards future modifications in the hands of end users and that such methods have application in real-world contexts.

Arduino is an open source electronics platform aimed at hobbyists, artists, and other people who want to make things but do not necessarily have a background in electronics or programming. We report the results of an exploratory empirical study that investigated the potential for a visual programming environment to provide benefits with respect to efficacy and user experience to end-user programmers of Arduino as an alternative to traditional text-based coding. We also investigated learning barriers that participants encountered in order to inform future programming environment design. Our study provides a first step in exploring end-user programming environments for open source electronics platforms.

The revolutionary advances of Information and Communication Technology push towards the evolution of end users from passive information consumers to information producers. In many contexts, end users are increasingly willing to manipulate content they get from various resources in the Web, move it across the boundaries of their original applications, and integrate it in Personal Information Spaces (PISs), where they can tailor it to their personal needs, use it, and possibly share it with other people. This paper extends our previous work on the definition of paradigms and tools for lightweight construction of PISs, and shows how to address the need for communicating and sharing information with other stakeholders, which emerged during a field study performed in November 2012 with the previous version of our platform.

Designers in HCI and end user development require a good understanding of actors in virtual interaction spaces. Persistent virtual worlds represent a rather new but growing class of complex design and interaction platforms. Online identities form the basis for interaction of individuals in virtual environments. We present results from an ethnographic study of a popular online game, and develop a socio-technical model of identity formation that illuminates the processes of identity design in online environments. This framework demonstrates how virtual worlds provide social and technological structures that shape self-presentation and interaction. This allows us to explore the relationship between the real-world identity of the game player and the virtual-world identity of their avatar.

A main activity in meta-design is the creation of design spaces allowing problem owners to act as system developers. Meta-design is a conceptual framework; it does not provide concrete design space solutions or engineering guidelines for constructing tools that support design spaces. This paper discusses the applicability of a model-driven engineering approach for the realization of an end-user service composition framework, in line with the conceptual meta-design framework. We report our experience of using meta-modelling techniques as supported by the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) family of tools. In our work we found that meta-models are well-suited to formalize the composition language, and the core parts of the EMF framework are useful to represent the language elements and user-made compositions both at design and runtime. Although EMF-based tools exist for creating visual editors, we found that in our case these did not map well to the visual notation we selected for our end-users.

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous end-user programming tools, but lack even the simplest abstraction mechanism: The ability to encapsulate a computation as a function. This was observed by Peyton-Jones and others [14], who proposed a mechanism to define such functions using only standard spreadsheet cells, formulas and references.

This paper extends their work by increasing expressiveness and emphasizing execution speed of the functions thus defined. First, we support recursive and higher-order functions, while still using only standard spreadsheet notation. Secondly, we obtain fast execution by a careful choice of data representation and compiler technology.

The result is a concept of

sheet-defined functions

that should be understandable to most spreadsheet users, yet offer sufficient programming power and performance to make end-user development of function libraries practical and attractive.

We outline a prototype implementation Funcalc of sheet-defined functions, and provide a case study with some evidence that it can express many important functions while maintaining good performance.

This paper investigates End-User Development of Information Visualization. More specifically, we investigated how existing visualization tools allow end-user developers to construct visualizations. End-user developers have some developing or scripting skills to perform relatively advanced tasks such as data manipulation, but no formal training in programming. 18 visualization tools were surveyed from an end-user developer perspective. The results of this survey study show that end-user developers need better tools to create and modify custom visualizations. A closer collaboration between End-User Development and Information Visualization researchers could contribute towards the development of better tools to support custom visualizations. In addition, as empirical evaluations of these tools are lacking both research communities should focus more on this aspect. The study serves as a starting point towards the engagement of end-user developers in visualization development.

Many domains such as scientific computing and neuroscience require end users to compose heterogeneous computational entities to automate their professional tasks. However, an issue that frequently hampers such composition is data-mismatches between computational entities. Although, many composition frameworks today provide support for data mismatch resolution through special-purpose data converters, end users still have to put significant effort in dealing with data mismatches, e.g., identifying the available converters and determining which of them meet their QoS expectations. In this paper we present an approach that eliminates this effort by automating the detection and resolution of data mismatches. Specifically, it uses architectural abstractions to automatically detect different types of data mismatches, model-generation techniques to fix those mismatches, and utility theory to decide the best fix based on QoS constraints. We illustrate our approach in the neuroscience domain where data-mismatches can be fixed in an efficient manner on the order of few seconds.

Time banking

facilitates generalized reciprocity among neighbors by rewarding contributions in proportion to the time entailed in contributing. Contributions can be person-to-person services, such as driving another person to an appointment. They can also be

co-productions

, in which the provider and recipient jointly enact a service, such as giving/receiving a guitar lesson. Co-production is an important category of time banking interaction; it has been identified as a key to strengthening the core economy of home, family, neighborhood and community, and is becoming integrated into government social service schemes. As part of a requirements analysis for mobile timing banking infrastructures, we identified and analyzed co-production scenarios. Our objective is to contribute to the social movements of co-production of social services and of time banking through designing and developing a socio-technical infrastructure that mutually leverages both to build up the core economy and to enable societal-scale time banking.

This paper aims at analyzing the category of multi-tiered proxy design problems, where end-user developers do not necessarily coincide with the actual end users of the system, but can be considered as end users’ proxies. This situation can be found in a variety of application domains, from home automation, where electricians defining home automation systems for energy saving are different from house occupants, to e-government, where administrative employees creating e-government services are different from citizens using those services. The analysis leads to the definition of a new interaction and co-evolution model, called ICE

2

, which, on the basis of the model discussed in a previous work, considers not only the case of end users that directly make their system evolve by means of end-user development activities, but also the case where a proxy figure is present, namely an expert in the application domain that creates and modifies software artifacts for others (the actual end users). Finally, a design approach is proposed, which aims at generalizing the solutions suggested in different application domains, and at sustaining the interaction and co-evolution processes that involve end users, end-user developers, and systems.

In this paper we present a web-based design-environment – MikiWiki – which demonstrates how the concept of meta-design can be practically supported. It enables and fosters collaboration between meta-designers, designers and end-users. By running a case study to evaluate the appropriateness of MikiWiki in a co-located setting, the effects on interaction between these roles and the support of creativity were observed to derive socio-technical options for improvement. Conducting such an evaluation requires clarifying the basic properties of meta-design in a way that makes its effects observable.

This paper presents end users’ ability to work across boundaries in design. The point of departure is a research project in which 60 end users participated as co-designers of ICT to support their everyday lives with the chronic illness diabetes. In additional to a series of digital co-designs, 22 mock-ups designed by the end users emerged from the project. These mock-ups/end-user designs are analyzed, with a focus on boundaries. This design case presents end users’ ability to create continuities across boundaries through their willingness to step into the unknown territory of ICT design and through their fusion of meanings of technology, diabetes, and everyday life experience in their designs. The paper concludes with reflections on engagement in boundary relations and call for embracing end users’ contributions to design by focusing on horizontal and hybrid cooperations.

This paper describes a participatory design project aimed at developing FirstAidMap, a collaborative web mapping application to be used by an Italian non-profit association for public assistance and first aid. Volunteers of this association, and specifically ambulance drivers, need to know the characteristics of the territory where the association ensures its assistance, in order to reach a given place quickly and in a safe manner. Despite the new opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies, paper-based maps are the only means used by volunteers to spread and share knowledge within the association, while training sessions through Powerpoint

TM

presentations are regularly held to train novice drivers about the dangers existing in the territory and possible changes to traffic and road signals. The two design cycles carried out to develop FirstAidMap, which are described in this paper, gave the chance to observe how a culture of participation may progressively emerge in a community informatics domain and how the related issues may be addressed.

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation, evolution, and innovation are more than luxuries: they are necessities. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity for more creative and more adequate solutions to problems.

End-User Development (EUD)

provides the enabling conditions for putting owners of problems in charge by defining the technical and social conditions for broad participation in design activities. It addresses the challenges of fostering new mindsets, new sources of creativity, and cultural changes to create foundations for innovative societies.

Grounded in the analysis of previous research activities this paper explores (1)

conceptual frameworks

for EUD (including: socio-technical environments; meta-design; and cultures of participation), (2)

models

guiding and supporting EUD (including: the seeding, evolutionary growth, reseeding process model; and richer ecologies of participation). These frameworks and models are briefly illustrated in one specific application domain.

The paper concludes by articulating new discourse concepts and design-tradeoffs to shape the future of EUD being understood as a

cultural transformation

rather than only as a technology in creating software artifacts.

The spread of the Internet has led to a change from a TV-childhood to a computer-childhood. We investigate how this shift towards networked forms of communication is reflected in constructionist learning environments and elaborate the concept of objects-to-think-with-together in the context of using computers as tool and social medium at the same time. In doing so, we propose four design aspects that should be considered in the context of socially-oriented constructionist learning environments: providing an integrated platform for construction and socializing, supporting re-mixing and re-using as well as self-expression and appreciation, allowing collaborative projects of non-collocated learners, and supporting enculturation and team-building.

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a system for promoting small towns based on the mash-up of various data sources for personalized mobile access. The positive issues and the open problems are discussed and evaluated in the frame of an experiment made in a region in Northern Italy.

This paper presents an empirical study of social media integrated in a product development process to support mutual software development. The case is Get Satisfaction, a company and crowd-sourcing community for customer engagement employed by many product development companies as an alternative to traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems. We have studied user-developer interactions through the company’s public support tools to identify how the company enhances its own productivity tools. The method we employ is interaction analysis. We focus on some productive interactions and analyze them in detail, including: “User request and developer implementation” (a long term activity, involving many users, sometimes leading to a new version of the tool). We refer to this form of user involvement in collaborative software development as “distributed EUD,” and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of using social media to mediate the activities.

This paper looks into the sharing of end-user software (referred to as “script”). Based on this study four implications are drawn: reduce the effort to make scripts shareable, minimize deployment burdens, less stringent protection mechanisms, and tap into communities of practice as for sharing. To attend these implications, we introduce a URL-based distribution schema for scripts combined with an IP-address-based authorization model. This makes scripts URL-addressable and easy to install, because choosing to install a script means that all of the necessary frameworks, plug-ins, etc. that are needed to make this script run are simultaneously installed. On the other hand, IP-based protection uses IP network prefixes as cypher keys. A script language is used as a proof of concept.

Justify

is an interactive “end-user development environment” for deliberation. Justify organizes discussions in a hierarchy of

points

, each expressing a single idea. Points have a rich ontology of types, such as

pro

or

con

,

mathematical,

or

aesthetic

arguments. “Programs” in this environment use inference rules to provide

assessments

that summarize groups of points. Interactive browsing modes serve as

visualizers

or

debuggers

for arguments.

Several recent approaches to EUD increasingly recognize an active role of users in the construction of the tools that support their daily practices. However, there is still a lack of a general framework that could play a role in the comparison of existing proposals and in the development of new EUD solutions. The paper proposes a conceptual framework and a related architecture, called Logic of Bricolage, that aims to be a step further in this direction. The concluding remarks point to the potential value of this conceptualization effort in the EUD field.

End-User Development (EUD) is an emerging research area aiming at empowering non-technical users to somehow create or design software artifacts. Mashups provide a high potential for EUD activities on the Web. Users on the Web can tap into a vast resource of off-the-shelf components in order to rapidly compose new lightweight software applications called mashups. In this paper, we provide a set of guidelines to design EUD systems for mashups that are widely referred to as

mashup tools

. The guidelines are derived from our experience with the (ongoing) design and evaluation of

NaturalMash

, a novel mashup tool targeted for a wide range of users to create feature-rich mashups.

We present an in-progress domain-specific language for actuaries. Due to the mathematical sophistication of actuaries and the relatively high degree of formalization of the field, we conjecture that a dependently-typed functional language with special support for actuarial models will enable actuaries to develop software that is robust and understandable.

Generation of test cases for end-user programmers is crucial to assure the correctness of their code. In this paper we investigate the automatic generation of test cases for programs that are written in Visual Basic for Applications and are used in MS Excel. We implement a metaheuristic search method to generate tests that achieve a satisfactory statement and branch coverage. Furthermore, in our methodology the code coverage is visualized. The generated test cases and the visualization enable end users to better understand the behavior of the programs and increase the probability of detecting errors when the code is changed at a later time.

End-user developers need access to tools and techniques that allow them to create, modify, and extend software artifacts without programming. Previous research has shown that visual software components can provide the right level of abstraction. However, component-based design (CBD) will succeed only if there is a good balance of standardization and flexibility (software issues) and a good balance of usefulness and usability (HCI issues). We present a vision for CBD and two approaches toward achieving it: 1) design by composition and 2) design by redesign. We claim that the latter is more user friendly but lacks the flexibility of the former. We propose the notion of “software readymade” as a theoretical concept to integrate them, inspired by the role of the “spectator” in the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp. We propose stand-alone multiperspective tailorable software components to instantiate the concept, and we give two examples (application units and nuggets).