Advanced Visual Systems Supporting Unwitting EUD

The ever increasing use of interactive software systems and the evolution of the World Wide Web into the so-called Web 2.0 determines the rise of new roles for users, who evolve from information consumers to information producers. The distinction between users and designers becomes fuzzy. Users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use, thus users and developers are not anymore two mutually exclusive groups of people. In this paper types of users that are between pure end users and software developers are analyzed. Some users take a very active role in shaping software tools to their needs, but they do it without being aware of programming, they are unwitting programmers who need appropriate development techniques and environments. A meta-design participatory approach for supporting unwitting end-user development through advanced visual systems is briefly discussed

Web navigation for individuals with dyslexia: An exploratory study

In this paper, we present an exploratory study of the web navigation experiences of dyslexic users. Findings indicate that dyslexics exhibit distinctive web navigation behaviour and preferences. We believe that the outcomes of this study add to our understanding of the particular needs of this web user population and have implications for the design of effective navigation structures

End-User Development of e-Government Services through Meta-modeling

This paper describes an approach to the end-user development of online services for citizens of a government agency. With reference to a typical government-to-citizen service, the paper discusses how such services are currently structured and provided to citizens, and how their implementation can be transferred from software professionals to administrative personnel, who do not generally possess any programming expertise. The analysis of e-government services is carried out according to different perspectives pertaining to the citizen, the employee, the software engineer and the human-computer interaction expert. This analysis leads to define an abstract service model (a meta-model) and constitutes the first phase of the end-user development approach here proposed. The meta-model can then be used to design an environment for service creation suitable to the competencies and background of the target end-user developers. This design activity constitutes the second phase of the proposed approach

Supporting End Users to Be Co-designers of Their Tools

Nowadays very different people use computer systems for their daily working activities, but also for fun and entertainment or only to satisfy their information needs. Designers are doing their best to create computer systems that work as end users expect, but it must be honestly admitted that they often fail and end users have all rights to complain. In order to improve this situation and create better systems, participatory approaches have been proposed, which involve end users in the design and development process. However, this solution is not without flaws, mainly because timing and ways of users’ participation are very critical. In this paper we discuss our approach to create working systems, which is based on a star model of the software life cycle that drives system design, development and evolution, since software design and development is seen as an evolutive process, driven by end-users activities in the real life. System development does not end with its first release; it is experimented by its end users and further evolved on the basis of their feedbacks. End users are truly engaged in the software life cycle as co-designers and experimenters of the software tools they will use in various application domains