Services as Materials: Using Mashups for Research

Using existing services as development and research materials can greatly reduce development burdens. However, using mashups and existing services has consequences that go beyond the technical realm. We present our ongoing experience with developing and promoting a mobile mash-up implemented in the mobile web browser: Spotisquare. Spotisquare is a mash-up of the location-based service foursquare and music streaming service Spotify. We discuss advantages and tradeoffs of using existing services and the mobile mash-up process, including interaction model choices, as well as validity and representational issues

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development is moving more and more toward composite applications that aggregate on the fly specific Web services and APIs. In this article, we present a mashup model that describes the integration, at the presentation layer, of UI components. The goal is to allow non-technical end users to visualize and manipulate (i.e., to perform actions on) the data displayed by the components, which thus become actionable UI components. This article shows how the model has guided the development of a mashup platform through which non-technical end users can create component-based interactive workspaces via the aggregation and manipulation of data fetched from distributed online resources. Due to the abundance of online data sources, facilitating the creation of such interactive workspaces is a very relevant need that emerges in different contexts. A utilization study has been performed in order to assess the benefits of the proposed model and of the Actionable UI Components; participants were required to perform real tasks using the mashup platform. The study results are reported and discussed

GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone