The application development process: What role does it play in the success of an application for the user developer?

End user development of applications forms a significant part of organisational systems development. This study investigates the role that developing an application plays in the eventual success of the application for the user developer. The results of this study suggest that the process of developing an application not only predisposes an end user developer to be more satisfied with the application than they would be if it were developed by another end user, but also leads them to perform better with it. Thus the results of the study highlight the contribution of the process of application development to application success

End-User Development of Visualizations

In this article the authors investigated a visualization tool (uVis) for end-user developers, in order to see how end users actually use it. The tool was an early version and the investigation helped the authors to improve it. The investigation showed that users appreciated the simple formula language, the coordinated panels, and the drag-and-drop mechanism. However, the most important thing for them was the immediate response when they changed something, for instance part of a formula. The entire visualization was updated immediately without having to switch from development view to production view.With uVis, developers construct a visualization from simple visual components such as boxes, curvePoints, and textboxes. All component properties such as Top and BackColor can be complex formulas similar to spreadsheet formulas. The operands in the formula can address relational data in a database, other visual objects, and dialog data provided by the user. A special Rows property can bind to a database query and make the component replicate itself for each row in the query. In this way, traditional as well as novel visualizations can be constructed.The most serious usability problems were data binding and not noticing errors (errors were shown in an error list, but not in the formula that had the error). There were many other usability problems. Removing them would speed up learning and make the tool more successful

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solution

Natural Notation for the Domestic Internet of Things

This study explores the use of natural language to give instructions that might be interpreted by Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a domestic `smart home' environment. We start from the proposition that reminders can be considered as a type of end-user programming, in which the executed actions might be performed either by an automated agent or by the author of the reminder. We conducted an experiment in which people wrote sticky notes specifying future actions in their home. In different conditions, these notes were addressed to themselves, to others, or to a computer agent.We analyse the linguistic features and strategies that are used to achieve these tasks, including the use of graphical resources as an informal visual language. The findings provide a basis for design guidance related to end-user development for the Internet of Things.Comment: Proceedings of the 5th International symposium on End-User Development (IS-EUD), Madrid, Spain, May, 201

Software environments for supporting End-User Development

Our work on End-User Development primarily focuses on the needs of a specific community of users, namely professionals in diverse areas outside of computer science, such as engineers, physicians, geologists and physicist, who are not professional programmers. We refer to them as domain experts. We developed a participatory design methodology, called SSW (Software Shaping Workshop) methodology, aimed at designing software environments that support domain experts to become co-designers of their tools. The different stakeholders can contribute their own views on the problem to design, development and maintenance of an application, using their own languages and notations. We also proposed a model of the Interaction and Co-Evolution processes (ICE model) occurring between users and system. It extends a previous model of Human-Computer Interaction by considering an important phenomenon occurring during the use of interactive systems, called co-evolution of users and systems

The Importance Of End-User Analysis In New Information System Adapters: Lessons Learned From Practice

The implementation of Information System (IS) in new-IS adapters can remain unused even when they developed properly. The previous research shows that the unsuccessful IS utilization problem primarily related to behavioral issues rather than technical issues. The behavioral issues should be addressed in the stakeholder analysis, an activity in the inception phase of requirement engineering. End-users of an IS are one of the focuses in stakeholder analysis. We studied the correlation of the end-user analysis in new-IS adapters with the successfulness of IS utilization. We conducted a qualitative studied on 20 IS development projects. The findings show strong correlation of the end-user behavior and the IS adoption. We suggest the end-user analysis is necessary for the IS development project in new-IS adapters. We concluded that it is recommended to formally get the end-user commitment before starting the IS development process. Keyword : Information System, end-user analysis, new-IS adapters, end-user commitmen

Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content

There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real users’ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial

Learning about End-User Development for Smart Homes by "Eating Our Own Dog Food"

SPOK is an End-User Development Environment that permits people to monitor, control, and configure smart home services and devices. SPOK has been deployed for more than 4 months in the homes of 5 project team members for testing and refinement, prior to longitudinal experiments in the homes of families not involved in the project. This article reports on the lessons learned in this initial deployment

End user development: Satisfaction with tools and satisfaction with applications

This study explored the relationship between end user developers’ perceptions of their applications and their perceptions of the tools used to create them. Satisfaction with a user developed application was found to be significantly correlated with satisfaction with the tool used to create the application. The role of experience in this relationship was also explored, and possible implications of the findings are discussed