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In the last few years, several end-user tools have been designed to help people who are not professional developers in programming their smart environments. However, such tools are often based on structured visual editors providing abstract representations of the available connected sensors and objects, which can be problematic for end users, and do not particularly encourage their participation. This work aims to make the end-user experience of creating everyday automations involving various types of connected sensors and objects more engaging by replacing extensive, static, structured and comprehensive abstract visual tools with more narrowed, relevant, context-sensitive, dynamic, augmented reality-based representations. We present a solution for this purpose that mobile users can exploit through their smartphone. End users can use the smartphone camera to frame the relevant sensor or object through the developed prototype, then get the current automations associated with it, edit their definition, create new ones as well as monitor the automations involving the whole current environment. We also report a first user test of the developed prototype deployed in a home equipped with connected sensors and objects, which yielded positive feedback.

A smart bracelet that reacts to a person's heartbeat. A smart bench that invites passers-by to sit close. These and others are smart things, part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and people's lives....

Context-awareness enables systems to be tailored to the needs of users and their real circumstances at certain times. A noteworthy trend in software development is that an increasing number of software systems are being developed by individuals with expert knowledge in other sectors. Because most of the current context-aware development toolkits are intended for software developers, these types of systems cannot be easily developed by non-technical consumers. The development of tools for designing context-aware frameworks by consumers who are not programming experts but are specialists in the area of implementation would result in faster adoption of such services by businesses. This paper provides a cloud-based framework for people without programming experience to create context-aware mobile applications. The platform can provide a lightweight distribution of packaged applications that allows experts to send specified information to mobile users based on their context data without overlapping between the rules of the application. An energy-efficient mobile application was developed to acquire contextual information from the user device and to create quality data accordingly. The framework adopts Platform as a Service (PaaS) and containerization to facilitate development of context-aware mobile applications by experts in various domains rather than developing a tool for each domain in isolation, while considering multitenancy.

The use of Smart Homes has grown considerably in the past decade. Enabling end-users to develop rules to program their homes and devices is very important to empower them. Several studies have anal...

End-user development (EUD) seeks to facilitate the extension and customisation of systems during use, with increasing possibilities as the Internet-of-Things (IoT) computing paradigm becomes widesp...

Given the growing adoption of IoT technologies, several approaches have been presented to enable people to increase their control over their smart devices and provide relevant support. Recommendation systems have been proposed in many domains, but have received limited attention in the area of End-User Development (EUD). We propose a novel approach for formulating recommendations in this area, based on deconstructing trigger-action rules into sequences of elements and the links between them. For this purpose, we propose a solution inspired by methods aimed at addressing the sequence-prediction problem. We have used this approach to provide users with two different types of recommendations: full rules for the one being edited, and parts of rules relevant for the next step to take in order to complete the current rule editing. In this paper, we present the design and a first evaluation of the two different possibilities to generate and display recommendations in a block-based EUD environment for creating automations for Internet of Things (IoT) contexts.

Knowledge bases store information on certain topics. Applying a well-structured and machine-readable format for a knowledge base is a prerequisite for any AI-based processing or reasoning. Semantic technologies (e.g. RDF) offer such a format and have the advantages that they make it possible to define the semantics of the information and support advanced querying. However, the disadvantage is that using such technologies is challenging for people not trained in IT, such as subject matter experts. This means that they need to rely on semantic technology experts to create, maintain, and query their knowledge bases. However, these experts are, in turn, not trained in the subject matter, while domain knowledge is essential for the construction of high-quality knowledge bases. In this paper, we present an end-user engineering approach for ontology-based knowledge bases. The goal is to allow subject matter experts to develop, maintain, and exploit the knowledge base themselves. We also present the supporting tools developed so far. The tools for the construction and the manual filling of the knowledge base are using the jigsaw metaphor to hide technicalities and guide the users. We also developed tools to automatically import data from spreadsheets into the knowledge base and to perform some type of quality control on the data. The end-user approach and the tools are demonstrated and evaluated for building a knowledge base in the toxicology domain.

In an effort towards the democratization of Robotics, this article presents a novel End-User Development framework called Robot Interfaces From Zero Experience (RIZE). The framework provides a set of useful software tools for the creation of robot-oriented software architectures and programming interfaces, as well as the modeling and execution of robot behaviors, with a specific emphasis on social behaviors. Programming interfaces built on top of RIZE enable professionals with different backgrounds and interests to design, adapt, and scale-up robotics applications. As an example of a programming interface, we present Open RIZE, which exploits an End-User Programming paradigm combining blocks, tables, and forms-filling interfaces. Unlike previous approaches, robot behavioral code generated by Open RIZE is intrinsically modular, re-usable, scalable, neutral to the employed programming language, and platform-agnostic. In the article, we present the main design guidelines and features of Open RIZE. Additionally, we perform an initial usability evaluation of the Open RIZE interface in an online workshop. Preliminary results using the System Usability Scale with 10 novice end-users indicate that Open RIZE is easy-to-use and learn.

The use of the World Wide Web has experienced extraordinary growth in the last decades. The Web has become the main source of information for millions of users. The number of websites offering content to users is countless. In order to personalise information according to their needs, users often have to visit multiple, unconnected pages. Users perform a number of actions to collect that information that requires concentration. If the number of Web resources is large, the activity becomes unpleasant. The problem increases when these tasks are performed frequently and repetitively. These tasks are time-consuming and lead users to experience frustration and disorientation during the activity, causing a loss of concentration that prolongs the activity over time. Web Augmentation combines different Web technologies to improve user experience on existing pages by adding content from different pages among other benefits. This article proposes Web Augmentation as a technique to reduce user interactions in repetitive tasks. To support the proposal, the paper introduces Excore, a browser extension for Web Augmentation that allows end-users to add content from different resources automatically. The article presents the benefits introduced by this approach as a response to the drawbacks experienced by users while performing their activities on the Web. The architecture of the platform and its operations are described by means of an example. A double evaluation of the extension is addressed, one qualitative and one quantitative. The results show that Excore reduces the number of interactions by 94.45% and the time to complete a task by 80.75%.

One strategy toward universalizing play is enabling more people to develop their own games. In this paper, our efforts toward a framework for inclusive creation of inclusive games are discussed. The hypothesis is that if end-users used creation tools suitable to their interaction needs and followed a collaborative work model to iteratively improve accessibility features to be inserted into a software architecture able to modify human-computer interaction at use-time, then they would be able to create games satisfying heterogeneous interaction needs of possible players. To verify the hypothesis, the architecture, the collaborative work model, and a game creation platform (Lepi) were designed to support game creation and play activities. Abilities were focused to provide opportunities for contributions based on skills, interests, and knowledge of people. The framework was evaluated over ten meetings spanning four months by people with alcohol and drug addiction from a public healthcare service. With the framework, participants were able to create their own games despite their different interaction needs (including low literacy, no previous contact with computers, emotional disabilities). By following the collaborative work model, they enabled people with different interaction needs than their own to play their games. Hence, with the framework, opportunities were provided to enable people with different interaction needs to contribute, create, and play. Game creation became a jigsaw puzzle, on which each piece (contribution) allowed people to create and play according to their abilities and skills.

Professional programmers are significantly outnumbered by end-users of software, making it problematic to predict the diverse, dynamic needs of these users in advance. An end-user development (EUD) approach, supporting the creation and modification of software independent of professional developers, is one potential solution. EUD activities are applicable to the work practices of psychology researchers and clinicians, who increasingly rely on software for assessment of participants and patients, but must also depend on developers to realise their requirements. In practice, however, the adoption of EUD technology by these two end-user groups is contingent on various contextual factors that are not well understood. In this paper, we therefore establish recommendations for the design of EUD tools allowing non-programmers to develop apps to collect data from participants in their everyday lives, known as "experience sampling" apps. We first present interviews conducted with psychology researchers and practising clinicians on their current working practices and motivation to adopt EUD tools. We then describe our observation of a chronic disease management clinic. Finally, we describe three case studies of psychology researchers using our EUD tool Jeeves to undertake experience sampling studies, and synthesise recommendations and requirements for tools allowing the EUD of experience sampling apps.

Graphical user interface (GUI) development is generally complicated, time-consuming, and requires programming knowledge. In the context of the internet of things, this work focuses on producing an efficient development approach that also supports non-experts. We introduce a novel “inverted” development approach that does not require program code to be written – a step towards supporting end-user development in the given context. The approach is realized as a language for describing GUIs, interpreters for rendering GUIs, and a graphical tool for creating and editing GUIs. The work is evaluated in a number of research projects in the domain of e-health; we conclude that the GUI language is practically viable for building professional-grade GUIs. Furthermore, the presented editor is compared directly to a market leading product in a controlled experiment. From this, we conclude that the editor is accessible to new users, and that it can be more efficient to use than the commercial alternative.

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Recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technology and the increased availability of VR-equipped devices enable a wide range of consumer-oriented applications. For novice developers, however, creating interactive scenes for VR applications is a complex and cumbersome task that requires high technical knowledge which is often missing. This hinders the potential of enabling novices to create, modify, and execute their own interactive VR scenes. Although recent authoring tools for interactive VR scenes are promising, most of them focus on expert professionals as the target group and neglect the novices with low programming knowledge. To lower the entry barrier, we provide an open-source web-based End-User Development (EUD) tool, called VREUD, that supports the rapid construction and execution of interactive VR scenes. Concerning construction, VREUD enables the specification of the VR scene including interactions and tasks. Furthermore, VREUD supports the execution and immersive experience of the created interactive VR scenes on VR head-mounted displays. Based on a user study, we have analyzed the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of VREUD which shows promising results to empower novices in creating their interactive VR scenes., Comment: Preprint - accepted at IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2021)

Physical computing is a complex activity that consists of different but tightly coupled tasks: programming and assembling hardware for circuits. Prior work clearly shows that this coupling is the main source of mistakes that unfruitfully take a large portion of novices' debugging time. While past work presented systems that simplify prototyping or introduce novel debugging functionalities, these tools either limit what users can accomplish or are too complex for beginners. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose prototyping tool based on conversation. HeyTeddy guides users during hardware assembly by providing additional information on requests or by interactively presenting the assembly steps to build a circuit. Furthermore, the user can program and execute code in real-time on their Arduino platform without having to write any code, but instead by using commands triggered by voice or text via chat. Finally, the system also presents a set of test capabilities for enhancing debugging with custom and proactive unit tests. We codesigned the system with 10 users over 6 months and tested it with realistic physical computing tasks. With the result of two user studies, we show that conversational programming is feasible and that voice is a suitable alternative for programming simple logic and encouraging exploration. We also demonstrate that conversational programming with unit tests is effective in reducing development time and overall debugging problems while increasing users' confidence. Finally, we highlight limitations and future avenues of research.

The pervasiveness of ICT technologies has led to a growing need to empower people to obtain applications that meet their specific requirements. End-User Development (EUD) is a growing research field aiming to provide people without programming experience with concepts, methods and tools to allow them to create or modify their applications. Recent mainstream technological trends related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and the availability of robots have further stimulated interest in this approach. In the paper, we discuss the historical evolution of EUD, then we analyses the main current challenges with respect to recent technological trends (IoT and social robots) through the use of some conceptual dimensions, and conclude with a discussion of a possible research agenda for the field.

The digital age of the future is ‘not out there to be discovered’, but it needs to be ‘designed’. The design challenge has to address questions about how we want to live, work, and learn (as indivi...

Progressive Web App (PWA) is a new approach to the development of mobile applications (apps) which was proposed by Google in 2015. It combines technology resources of both web and native apps. Meta-design is an End-User Development (EUD) approach from which end-users participate actively in a system's design process. Yet, PWAs are a recent technology and the impacts of associating EUD and PWAs has been little exploited. As the traditional PWA approach is limited regarding users acting as co-designers, we propose the PWA-EU approach, an extension of the traditional PWA architecture that includes EUD concepts. PWA-EU provides contributions in two lenses. First, the proposal was designed to be used by developers on the design/development time. Second, the app developed using PWA-EU approach will allow end-users to select design preferences, which makes them participants of the app's design. This active participation of end-users on the design is possible due to the meta-design concepts present on the PWA-EU approach. In this article, we present the PWA-EU approach and its evaluation in the perspective of developers/designers. For the evaluation, we grouped participants according to their professional background. The results also indicate that novice developers had a reasonable performance with only one hour of training.We conclude that even novice developers could achieve better performance in a real-life environment, in which they would have more time.

One of the goals of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is to extend the time that elderly people can live independently in their preferred environments by using ICT technologies for personal healthcare. However, in order to be optimal, remote monitoring services and health-related interventions should be strongly personalised to specific individuals' requirements, preferences, abilities and motivations, which can vary among the elderly, and even dynamically evolve over time for the same person depending on changing user needs and context-dependent conditions. In this paper we present an End User Development (EUD) tool for the personalisation of context-dependent assistance by non-technical users in the AAL domain. In particular, we have considered applications for remotely monitoring and assisting elderly people at home through sending multimedia messages and reminders, as well as changing the state of various domestic appliances (e.g. lamps, heating system, TV) and devices available in the context surrounding the user. The design and development of the tailoring environment has been carried out in an iterative manner, informed by the feedback that was gathered through empirical evaluations done with older adults and caregivers.

End-user development (EUD) is widely used today for the personalization of the most diffused commercial virtual assistants (VAs), both for the configuration of VA-controlled smart environments and the definition of automatic behaviours. However, EUD is not yet exploited to its potential. In this paper, we present the results of a long-time use of VAs in our homes: we compare the most known VAs and discuss a set of challenges that we identified and that can guide the future directions of Human-Computer Interaction research in this field.

In the last few years, several organizations have been looking for strategies to meet the needs of users of Information Technology (IT). The decentralization of IT and the empowerment of nonprofessional users have been a viable option among these strategies. This study aimed to identify the End-User Development (EUD) strategies adopted by organizations. A systematic mapping was performed in order to provide for a structured body of knowledge and find potential research gaps. The results show that EUD methods and techniques are the most common strategies addressed in the literature. Also, most of the EUD strategies identified a focus either on EUD managerial issues, such as risk management, or on more technical elements, such as the implementation of components for EUD applications. The benefits and barriers to the adoption of EUD by organizations are also presented in this study. In general, defining EUD processes is a common gap in EUD surveys. We reinforce the need to carry out more research on the adoption of EUD in organizations, with a high level of evidence to validate the results.

This paper describes the concepts that have emerged within Quando, an end user toolset, used for creating digital interactives through browser based code generation for museums and theatre. End user focused concepts and recommendations have been identified with Research through Design, including the ability to create new visual blocks as part of the toolset.

This paper presents the early stages of my PhD work, which consists of a solution for supporting end users in configuring eXtended Reality (XR) environments, exploiting templates created by experts. The proposed approach is based on an EUD [8] methodology for solving this problem, employing Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rule-language defining the environment behaviour and the design of an immersive authoring interface.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of including a conversational intelligent agent for helping end user developers in defining the behaviour of point-and-click games through event-condition action rules. We discuss the rule support in a web-based authoring environment, together with the design and the implementation of the agent in the form of a chatbot. We compared the versions with and without the chatbot and the results show a decrease in the perceived cognitive load in complex tasks.

In this paper, we present the design and the evaluation of an authoring tool for End-User Development, which supports the definition of Trigger-Actions rules that combines events and states in the triggers. The possibility of using either states or events in triggers has already been discussed in the literature. However, it is recognized that the state/event distinction is difficult to manage for users. In this paper, we propose an authoring tool that provides explicit support for managing this distinction. We compare it with a state-of-the-art authoring tool that implements the classical event-event paradigm.

This paper presents an interaction paradigm for the design of chatbots. Its novelty is the completion of conversational patterns that progressively guide the design activity and provide an interactive, immediate representation of the conversation under construction. Thanks to the automatic generation of code, the paradigm facilitates the rapid prototyping of the conversational UI, thus it empowers non-programmers to master the design process. The paper also illustrates some preliminary user studies and discusses some lessons learned for the definition of interactive paradigms for the design of conversational UIs.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has transformed everyday manual tasks into digital and automatable ones, giving way to the birth of several end-user development solutions that attempt to ease the task of configuring and automating IoT systems without requiring prior technical knowledge. While some studies reflect on the automation rules that end-users choose to program into their spaces, they are limited by the number of devices and possible rules that the tool under study supports. There is a lack of systematic research on (1) the automation rules that users wish to configure on their homes, (2) the different ways users state their intents, and (3) the complexity of the rules themselves—without the limitations imposed by specific IoT devices systems and end-user development tools. This paper surveyed twenty participants about home automation rules given a standard house model and device’s list, without limiting their creativity and resulting automation complexity. We analyzed and systematized the collected 177 scenarios into seven different interaction categories, representing the most common smart home interactions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and End-User Development (EUD) look at automation from two different perspectives. The former tends to provide fully automatic solutions, the latter aims to empower users to directly create what they want. We need both, but it is still unclear how to combine them to obtain effective every-day automations that meet the flexible and dynamic user needs. The panel aims to stimulate the Human-Computer Interaction community to think more carefully about such aspects and the possible approaches to address them.

The purpose of this work is to explore the potentialities of a personalization platform in industrial settings. We report on a case study in the paper factory domain, in which the industrial aspects identified with relevant experts through interviews have been simulated and connected with a personalization platform. A first user test has been carried out with a representative set of users, which has provided useful and encouraging feedback in terms of the potentialities of the approach in industrial settings.

Robots are widespread across diverse application contexts. Teaching robots to perform tasks, in their respective contexts, demands a high domain and programming expertise. However, robot programming faces high entry barriers due to the complexity of robot programming itself. Even for experts robot programming is a cumbersome and error-prone task where faulty robot programs can be created, causing damage when being executed on a real robot. To simplify the process of robot programming, we combine Augmented Reality (AR) with principles of end-user development. By combining them, the real environment is extended with useful virtual artifacts that can enable experts as well as non-professionals to perform complex robot programming tasks. Therefore, Simple Programming Environment in Augmented Reality with Enhanced Debugging (SPEARED) was developed as a prototype for an AR-assisted robot programming environment. SPEARED makes use of AR to project a robot as well as a programming environment onto the target working space. To evaluate our approach, expert interviews with domain experts from the area of industrial automation, robotics, and AR were performed. The experts agreed that SPEARED has the potential to enrich and ease current robot programming processes.

User interface design has become increasingly difficult due to the rise of new kinds of electronic devices and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Further, user interface (UI) designers struggle to adapt their UIs to evolving user needs and preferences. In order to address these issues, we want to support end users in designing their own user interfaces. However, end-user UI design represents a major challenge, given that end users often lack the necessary design skills. We investigated how design recommendations might be used to address the research question on how to help end users during the UI design process? A first step towards answering this question is the analysis of how end users should best get recommendations about potential design improvements. We therefore conducted a survey on how end users would like to get design recommendations, whether they trust user- or machine-generated recommendations, and whether they agree that their interactions are tracked and shared in order to improve the recommendations. Based on the results of our survey, we present a set of design requirements for the integration of recommendations in end-user UI design tools.

The Internet of Things introduced pervasive deployment in the environment of a variety of network connected smart objects. In this context, people's daily lives could benefit by using smart objects which can offer them an environment of automations on their everyday activities. However, in practice, the demands for such automations are so highly personalized and fluid resulting in a respective digital market that is either inexistent or marginal. Our vision in this PhD thesis is to provide end-users with the necessary tools enabling them to easily and quickly craft, test and change the automations they desire. The latter implies end-users to directly manipulate smart objects in a developer perspective, ranging from parameterizing and linking together, to actually programming the control and coordination of a set of smart objects. In this paper, we firstly discuss the background of such tools. Then, we analyze the research questions that have to be addressed. Finally, the proposed approach and the roadmap of the work are discussed.

In this paper, we present an intelligent support End-User Developers (EUDevs) in creating plot lines for Point and Click games on the web. We introduce a story generator and the associated user interface, which help the EUDev in defining the game plot starting from the images providing the game setting. Such suggestions can be further developed by the EUDev, modifying the generated text and saving the result. The interface supports the control of different parameters of the story generator using a user-friendly vocabulary. The results of a user study show good effectiveness and usability of the proposed interface.