Spreadsheet-driven web applications

Creating and publishing read-write-compute web applications requires programming skills beyond what most end users possess. But many end users know how to make spreadsheets that act as simple information management applications, some even with computation. We present a system for creating basic web applications using such spreadsheets in place of a server and using HTML to describe the client UI. Authors connect the two by placing spreadsheet references inside HTML attributes. Data computation is provided by spreadsheet formulas. The result is a reactive read-write-compute web page without a single line of Javascript code. Nearly all of the fifteen HTML novices we studied were able to connect HTML to spreadsheets using our method with minimal instruction. We draw conclusions from their experience and discuss future extensions to this programming model

Measuring Mental Effort for Creating Mobile Data Collection Applications

To deal with drawbacks of paper-based data collection procedures, the QuestionSys approach empowers researchers with none or little programming knowledge to flexibly configure mobile data collection applications on demand. The mobile application approach of QuestionSys mainly pursues the goal to mitigate existing drawbacks of paper-based collection procedures in mHealth scenarios. Importantly, researchers shall be enabled to gather data in an efficient way. To evaluate the applicability of QuestionSys, several studies have been carried out to measure the efforts when using the framework in practice. In this work, the results of a study that investigated psychological insights on the required mental effort to configure the mobile applications are presented. Specifically, the mental effort for creating data collection instruments is validated in a study with N=80 participants across two sessions. Thereby, participants were categorized into novices and experts based on prior knowledge on process modeling, which is a fundamental pillar of the developed approach. Each participant modeled 10 instruments during the course of the study, while concurrently several performance measures are assessed (e.g., time needed or errors). The results of these measures are then compared to the self-reported mental effort with respect to the tasks that had to be modeled. On one hand, the obtained results reveal a strong correlation between mental effort and performance measures. On the other, the self-reported mental effort decreased significantly over the course of the study, and therefore had a positive impact on measured performance metrics. Altogether, this study indicates that novices with no prior knowledge gain enough experience over the short amount of time to successfully model data collection instruments on their own. Therefore, QuestionSys is a helpful instrument to properly deal with large-scale data collection scenarios like clinical trials

Mavo: Creating Interactive Data-Driven Web Applications by Authoring HTML

Many people can author static web pages with HTML and CSS but find it hard or impossible to program persistent, interactive web applications. We show that for a broad class of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications, this gap can be bridged. Mavo extends the declarative syntax of HTML to describe Web applications that manage, store and transform data. Using Mavo, authors with basic HTML knowledge define complex data schemas implicitly as they design their HTML layout. They need only add a few attributes and expressions to their HTML elements to transform their static design into a persistent, data-driven web application whose data can be edited by direct manipulation of the content in the browser. We evaluated Mavo with 20 users who marked up static designs---some provided by us, some their own creation---to transform them into fully functional web applications. Even users with no programming experience were able to quickly craft Mavo applications

Initial report on Object Spreadsheets

There is a growing demand for data-driven web applications that help automate organizational and business processes of low to medium complexity by letting users view and update structured data in controlled ways. We present Object Spreadsheets, an end-user development tool that combines a spreadsheet interface with a rich data model to help the process administrators build the logic for such applications themselves. Its all-in-one interface with immediate feedback has the potential to bring more complex tasks within reach of end-user developers, compared to existing approaches. Our data model is based on the structure of entity-relationship models and directly supports nested variable-size collections and object references, which are common in web applications but poorly accommodated by traditional spreadsheets. Object Spreadsheets has a formula language suited to the data model and supports stored procedures to specify the forms of updates that application users may make. Formulas can be used to assemble data in the exact structure in which it is to be shown in the application UI, simplifying the task of UI building; we intend for Object Spreadsheets to be integrated with a UI builder to provide a complete solution for application development. We describe our prototype implementation and several example applications we built to demonstrate the applicability of the tool

ZenStates: Easy-to-Understand Yet Expressive Specifications for Creative Interactive Environments

International audienceMuch progress has been made on interactive behavior development tools for expert programmers. However, little effort has been made in investigating how these tools support creative communities who typically struggle with technical development. This is the case, for instance, of media artists and composers working with interactive environments. To address this problem, we introduce ZenStates: a new specification model for creative interactive environments that combines Hierarchical Finite-States Machines, expressions, off-the-shelf components called Tasks, and a global communication system called the Blackboard. Our evaluation is three-folded: (a) implementing our model in a direct manipulation-based software interface; (b) probing ZenStates' expressive power through 90 exploratory scenarios; and (c) performing a user study to investigate the understandability of ZenStates' model. Results support ZenStates viability, its expressivity, and suggest that ZenStates is easier to understand-in terms of decision time and decision accuracy-compared to two popular alternatives