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Studying human behavior is of particular interest within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as it can provide insight into human performance. Prior HCI research suggests that mouse and keyboard monitoring may provide a more complete picture of user behavior under high cognitive loads like decision making and developing tasks. In this exploratory study we investigate the potential correlation between mouse behavioral patterns or keystroke dynamics and a set of End-User Development (EUD) behavioral attributes. We conduct a field test on 30 end-users interacting with a modern web-based EUD tool for the construction of simple web forms. Our findings reveal the existence of several significant correlations between end-users’ behavioral attributes and mouse pattern metrics or keystroke dynamics during the development process. Mouse pattern metrics like random and straight movements, mouse hovers, etc., can be associated with perceived ease use, perceived usefulness, self-efficacy, willingness to learn or risk-perception. Similarly, some keystroke dynamics like key press speed and down-to-down time can be associated with perceived ease of use or self-efficacy. The findings of this work show a new interesting research direction and may motivate the EUD research community to study further the end-users’ mouse and keyboard behavior in today's web-based EUD systems.

In the recent years in the End-User Development (EUD) research there is a shift from the study of tools that focus on desktop graphical applications, to the development of EUD for web environments. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research has shown significant gender differences while users interact with EUD systems. However, most of this research focuses on desktop spreadsheet environments. In this paper we examine the potential gender differences in perception and acceptance in modern web-based EUD environments. We step on previous gender research in the fields of EUD and Technology Acceptance to concentrate a set of appropriate items and examine a set of related hypotheses. To check out our research hypotheses we have conducted a field test using a prototype web-based EUD tool based on a natural language approach (named ‘simple talking’), to assist end-users in creating database-driven mobile applications. The results of the field test show significant gender differences in Risk-Perception and Perceived-Ease of Use. As it was predicted, male users perceived significantly higher ease of use and female users perceived significantly higher risk. Gender differences also exist in the correlations between different pairs of perception and acceptance items.

A user-centered approach to assist end-users design a relational database structure is proposed.A prototype end-user development tool that adopts the approach is designed.An experiment is conducted on two expertise-related user groups to examine their performance.Non experienced users performed a little better than experienced users.Gender did not significantly affect performance. Perceived ease of use and usefulness were high. Since every-day users are not aware of database concepts, it is almost impossible for them to design even the basic structure of their self-developed applications with existing low level database-developing prototype applications. Most of the existing prototype applications demand at least some basic knowledge of SQL syntax and/or database logic. Hence, the end-users have either to be trained to use such prototype applications or the prototype applications have to be designed in such a way as to support untrained end-users. In this paper we present an approach based on 'simple-talking' to abstract database terminology and logic from the application development process. In this approach we assist untrained users to progressively design the whole database structure of their applications. The idea behind 'simple-talking' approach is to let the user choose a verb that describes the relationship between entities, and use this verb to form questions for the various database items. Our approach follows the relational paradigm since it is the dominant database type and the most complicated for the end-user to understand. Based on a prototype application we have conducted experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of 'simple-talking' approach and reveal its usefulness for end-user development.