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This paper describes the prototype of a framework for designing interactive applications for cultural heritage sites by following an end-user development approach. The framework is devoted to all design stakeholders, i.e. software engineers, HCI experts, cultural heritage experts and visitors, and provides them with tailored design environments for contributing their expertise to shaping the final applications. The design is guided by application templates, which provide the rules for assembling the basic components, called building blocks, whose result is the final application.

Scheduling staff shift work in a hospital ward is a well-known problem in the operation research field but, as such, it is very often studied from the algorithmic point of view and seldom from the human-computer interaction perspective. In most cases, the automatic solutions that operations research may provide do not satisfy the involved people. After discussing the inconveniences of an automatic approach with physicians, we have designed a staff scheduling system that combines an expert system with an information visualization (IV) system; in this way the schedule generated by the expert system is presented through the IV system to the schedule manager, who can modify the results if last minute changes are necessary, by directly manipulating the visualized data and obtaining immediate feedback about the changes made.