Web mashups with webmakeup

Modding refers to the act of modifying hardware, software, or virtually anything else, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. The rationales for modding should be sought in the aspiration of users to contextualize to their own situation the artefact at hand. Websites are not exception. WebMakeup targets mod scenarios where web pages are turned into canvases users can tune to account for their situational, idiosyncratic, and potentially, short-lived needs. By clicking, users turn DOM nodes into widgets. Widgets can next be rearranged, deleted, updated or stored for later reuse in other pages. In addition, widgets can be involved in ?blink? patterns where interactions with a widget might affect the related widgets. This empowers users to tune not only what but also when content is to show up in an AJAX-like way. WebMakeup is publicly available as a Chrome extension.Fil: Díaz, Oscar. Universidad del País Vasco; EspañaFil: Aldalur, Iñigo. Universidad del País Vasco; EspañaFil: Arellano, Cristóbal. Universidad del País Vasco; EspañaFil: Medina, Haritz. Universidad del País Vasco; EspañaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentin

Engaging end-user driven recommender systems: personalization through web augmentation

In the past decades recommender systems have become a powerful tool to improve personalization on the Web. Yet, many popular websites lack such functionality, its implementation usually requires certain technical skills, and, above all, its introduction is beyond the scope and control of end-users. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents a novel tool to empower end-users without programming skills, without any involvement of website providers, to embed personalized recommendations of items into arbitrary websites on client-side. For this we have developed a generic meta-model to capture recommender system configuration parameters in general as well as in a web augmentation context. Thereupon, we have implemented a wizard in the form of an easy-to-use browser plug-in, allowing the generation of so-called user scripts, which are executed in the browser to engage collaborative filtering functionality from a provided external rest service. We discuss functionality and limitations of the approach, and in a study with end-users we assess the usability and show its suitability for combining recommender systems with web augmentation techniques, aiming to empower end-users to implement controllable recommender applications for a more personalized browsing experience.Fil: Wischenbart, Martin. Johannes Kepler University Linz; AustriaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Bosetti, Gabriela Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Kapsammer, Elisabeth. Johannes Kepler University Linz; Austri

CrowdMock: An Approach for Defining and Evolving Web Augmentation Requirements

Web Applications are accessed by millions of users with different needs, goals, concerns or preferences. Several well-known Web Applications provide personalized features, e.g. they recommend specific content to users by contemplating individual characteristics or requirements. However, since most Web Application cannot consider all users? requirements, many developers started to create their own mechanisms for adapting existing applications. One of the most popular techniques for third party applications adaptation is Web Augmentation, which is based on the alteration of its original user interface, generally by using scripts running at the client-side (e.g. the browser). In the context of Web Augmentation, two user roles have emerged: scripters who are those users able to create a new augmentation artefact, and end-users without programming skills, that just consume the artefacts that may satisfy totally or partially their needs. Scripters and end-users generally do not know each other and they have rarely a contact, beyond the fact that they use the same script repositories. When end-users cannot get their needs covered with existing artefacts, they claim for new ones by specifying their requirements (called Web Augmentation requirements) using textual descriptions, which are usually hard to interpret by scripters. Web Augmentation requirements are a very particular kind of Web requirements for which there partially exist a solution implemented by the Web site owner, but still users need to change or augment that implementation with very specific purposes that they desire to be available in such site. In this paper, we propose an approach for defining and evolving Web Augmentation requirements using rich visual prototypes and textual descriptions that can be automatically mapped onto running software artefacts. We present a tool implemented to support this approach and we show an evaluation of both the approach and the tool.Fil: Firmenich, Diego. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia; ArgentinaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rivero, José Matías. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Antonelli, Leandro. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentin

Collaborative web extensions: a P2P approach

Web extensions are powerful software artifacts that allow end-users toadapt and enrich a website. These extensions run on the user´s web browser as asingle-user software that manipulates available third-party web contents. Manyof them offer some collaborative features that depend on a web application. Theneed of two co-depending software artifacts (the web application as back-end andthe web extensions as front-end) increases complexity, making the system harderto develop and maintain. In this paper we tackle this problem by proposing a P2Papproach to build collaborative web extensions. The approach involves amiddleware and a framework. On the one hand, the middleware serves to managethe resources offered by the browser so multiple P2P extensions can coexist. Itensures that the overall performance of the browser is not degraded by thecollaborative web extension. On the other hand, the proposed framework isintended to allow developers without experience in P2P to create collaborativeweb extensions on top of the middleware. This paper discusses the mainchallenges of building P2P web extensions, presents the approach, and two casestudies focused on the use of the framework for inexperienced developers.Fil: Gonzalez, Rodolfo. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Fernandez, Alejandro. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentin

A framework for concern-sensitive, client-side adaptation

Currently the Web is a platform for performing complex tasks which involve dealing with different Web applications. However, users still have to face these tasks in a handcrafted way. While building “opportunistic” service-based software, such as mashups, can be a solution for combining data and information from different providers, many times this approach might have limitations. In this paper we present a novel approach which combines concern-sensitive application adaptation with user-collected data to improve the user experience while performing a task. We have developed some simple though powerful tools for applying this approach to some typical tasks such as trip planning. We illustrate the paper with simple though realistic examples and compare our work with others in the same field.Fil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Winckler, Marco. Université Paul Sabatier; FranciaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Gordillo, Silvia. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; Argentin

An approach for building Mobile Web Applications through Web Augmentatio

Mobile Web Applications combine traditional navigation access enriched with location-based services, which results in a more complex development process since there are a myriad of issues to consider while integrating these kinds of behaviours. This complexity increases even more if the integration of another specific functionality is considered, as personalization or context-aware services. In this article we present a novel approach to facilitate the development of Web applications that enhance existing ones with mobile features through client-side Web Augmentation. Assuming the existence of a set of Web pages that could be associated to a physical object and some mechanism for location sensing, we allow developers to define mobile services or adaptations according to their own interests. We present a detailed comparative analysis of the features we provide against other similar approaches, in order to clearly highlight those aspects that distinguish our work from the existing ones. Finally, we show that this approach is feasible and effective by presenting two prototype applications for two possible scenarios and the results of our first experiment.Fil: Bosetti, Gabriela Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Gordillo, Silvia Ethel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentin

Usability improvement through A/B testing and refactoring

Usability evaluation is an essential task in web application development. There have been several attempts to integrate user-centered design with agile methods, but it is hard to synchronize their practices. User testing is very valuable to learn from feedback of actual use, but it remains expensive to find and solve usability problems. Furthermore, the high cost of usability evaluation forces small/medium-sized companies to trust the first solution applied, without actually testing the success of the solution or considering a possible regression in usability, as could be highlighted by an iterative testing method. In this article, we advocate for a usability improvement cycle oriented by user feedback, and compatible with an agile development process. We propose an iterative method supported by a toolkit that allows usability experts to design user tests, run them remotely, analyze results, and assess alternative solutions to usability problems similarly to A/B testing. Each solution is created by applying client-side web refactorings, i.e., changes to the web pages in the client which are meant to improve usability. The main benefit of our approach is that it reduces the overall cost of user testing and particularly, A/B testing, by applying refactorings to create alternative solutions without modifying the application’s server code. By making it affordable for usability experts to apply the method in parallel with the development cycle, we aim to encourage them to incorporate user feedback and try different ideas to discover the best-performing solution in terms of the metrics of interest.Fil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Garrido, Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Grigera, Julián. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Rivero, José Matías. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentin

UX-Painter: An approach to explore interaction fixes in the browser

Usability and user interaction improvement is a central task in web development to guarantee the success of a web application. However, designers are barely able to keep up with the current development cycle because their practices are too costly, while interaction issues accumulate in applications that end-users keep suffering. In this work, we propose a method for designers to rapidly explore solutions through visual programming to the interaction problems of an application under development, even when it has been already deployed. The method is realized by a tool called UX-Painter, an exploratory tool for designers to apply quick fixes to interaction issues at the client-side of a web application without the need of any script programming knowledge. The palette of available fixes in UX-Painter are client-side web refactorings, i.e., changes to web page elements that solve specific user interaction problems without changing the underlying functionality. UX-Painter allows designers to quickly set up new versions of a web application by combining refactorings to create alternative designs for user testing or an inspection review. UX-Painter also provides the means to communicate design improvements, as a sequence of refactorings with clear semantics. We show the feedback provided by interviews with designers about UX-Painter's functionality and the results of a user test about its usability.Fil: Gardey, Juan Cruz. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; ArgentinaFil: Garrido, Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; ArgentinaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; ArgentinaFil: Grigera, Julián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentin

Improving accessibility of Web interfaces: refactoring to the rescue

Universal access should be a target for all public Web sites. However, it is very hard to achieve, and even Web applications that comply with accessibility standards may still lack usability for disabled users. This paper proposes refactoring as an essencial technique to incrementally improve the accessibility and usability of a Web interface. Some accessibility refactorings are described and classified by the problems that each refactoring addresses. The way mainstream Web sites struggle with accessibility is illustrated, and two evaluations of email clients are presented as empirical evidence of the significance of accessibility refactorings at a low implementation cost.Fil: Garrido, Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Medina Medina, Nuria. Universidad de Granada; EspañaFil: Grigera, Julián. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Personalized Web Accessibility using Client-Side Refactoring

According to W3C accessibility standards, most Web applications are neither accessible nor usable for people with disabilities. Developers often solve this problem by building separate accessible applications, but these are seldom usable and typically offer less functionality than the original. Another common solution is to maintain a single application, but create an accessible view by applying on-the-fly transformations to each requested page ? a solution that rarely suits all audiences. A third solution is described here: let users improve Web accessibility in their client browsers through interface refactorings, which offer many customized, accessible views of a single application.Fil: Garrido, Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Hector. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Grigera, Julián. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; ArgentinaFil: Medina Medina, Nuria. Universidad de Granada; EspañaFil: Harari, Ivana. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Informatica; Argentin