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The research field of end-user development has evolved, during recent years, to a certain degree of internal structure, problem awareness and consistency. Both academia and industry have begun to consider it an important field for research and development. In order to let EUD research contribute to the Information Societies, research and development must continue in a consolidated and well-balanced way. This chapter provides an overview of major challenges, motivates why these challenges should be addressed with considerable effort to bring about an Information Society with empowered end-users, and finally discusses how these challenges should be translated into a concrete research and development agenda for the short- and mid-term future. Key words. tailorability, end user programming, flexibility, usability [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

End-user development (EUD) has enormous potential to make computers more useful in a large variety of contexts by providing people without any formal programming training increased control over information processing tasks. This variety of contexts poses a challenge to EUD system designers. No individual system can hope to address all of these challenges. The field of EUD is likely to produce a plethora of systems fitting specific needs of computer end-users. The goal of this chapter is not to advocate a kind of universal EUD system, but to cut across a variety of application domains based on our experience with the AgentSheets end-user simulation-authoring tool.We have pioneered a number of programming paradigms, experienced a slew of challenges originating in different user communities, and evolved EUD mechanisms over several years. In this chapter we present design guidelines that cut across this vast design space by conceptualizing the process of EUD as a learning experience. Fundamentally, we claim that every EUD system should attempt to keep the learning challenges in proportion to the skills end-users have. By adopting this perspective, EUD can actively scaffold a process during which end-users pick up new EUD tools and gradually learn about new functionality. We structure these design guidelines in accordance to their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic nature of support offered to end-users. Key words. agents, end-user programming, graphical rewrite rules, programming by example, visual programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological research into the usability of programming languages and environments, and the cognitive processes that must be supported to improve their usability, has been conducted for over 30 years [dating at least to Weinberg's (1971) book "The Psychology of Computer Programming"]. For the past 15 years, there have been two permanent research communities devoted to this topic: the Psychology of Programming Interest Group in Europe (www.ppig.org) and the Empirical Studies of Programmers Foundation in America. This chapter presents a survey of the research that has been conducted in those communities, the relationship between that research and end-user development, case studies of shared research themes, and design approaches that have arisen from these themes. In this chapter, I will refer to the work of both communities under the generic term "psychology of programming," although as will become clear later, this term is not completely adequate. Key words. psychology, programming, end-users, education, spreadsheets, scripting, design models [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We think it is time to take another look at an old dream—that one could program a computer by speaking to it in natural language. Programming in natural language might seem impossible, because it would appear to require complete natural language understanding and dealing with the vagueness of human descriptions of programs. Butwe think that several developments might nowmake programming in natural language feasible. First, improved broad coverage natural language parsers and semantic extraction techniques permit partial understanding. Second, mixed-initiative dialogues can be used for meaning disambiguation. And finally, where direct understanding techniques fail, we hope to fall back on Programming by Example, and other techniques for specifying the program in a more fail-soft manner. To assess the feasibility of this project, as a first step, we are studying how non-programming users describe programs in unconstrained natural language.We are exploring how to design dialogs that help the user make precise their intentions for the program, while constraining them as little as possible. Key words. natural language programming, natural language processing, parsing, part-of-speech tagging, computer science education, programming languages, scripting languages, computer games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation, evolution, and innovation are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity for more creative and more adequate solutions to problems. Meta-design is an emerging conceptual framework aimed at defining and creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. It extends the traditional notion of system design beyond the original development of a system to include a coadaptive process between users and a system, inwhich the users become co-developers or co-designers. It is grounded in the basic assumption that future uses and problems cannot be completely anticipated at design time, when a system is developed. Users, at use time, will discover mismatches between their needs and the support that an existing system can provide for them. These mismatches will lead to breakdowns that serve as potential sources of new insights, new knowledge, and new understanding. This chapter is structured in four parts: conceptual framework, environments, applications, and findings and challenges. Along the structure of the chapter, we discuss and explore the following essential components of meta-design, providing requirements, guidelines, and models for the future of end-user development: (1) the relationship of meta-design to other design methodologies; (2) the Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, Reseeding Model, a process model for large evolving design artifacts; (3) the characteristics of unself-conscious cultures of design, their strengths and their weaknesses, and the necessity for owners of problems to be empowered to engage in end-user development; (4) the possibilities created by meta-design to bring co-creation alive; and (5) the need for an integrated design space that brings together a technical infrastructure that is evolvable, for the design of learning environments and work organizations that allow end-users to become active contributors, and for the design of relational settings in which users can relate, find motivations and rewards, and accumulate social capital. Key words. co-creation, design for change, design space, design time, domain-oriented design environments, Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory, interactive art, open systems, SER model, social capital, underdesign, unself-conscious cultures of design, use time, value-feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One approach to designing usable and enjoyable computer applications is to say that designers need better methods and tools to understand users and their contexts, and to encode this understanding into closed computer systems. Another is to acknowledge that there will always be unattended user needs, and that the way to increase users' satisfaction is to help them modify systems in order to meet constantly changing requirements. Different techniques are proposed in one approach usually without reference to the other. We present an overarching perspective of human-computer interactionwhere both meet, and provide a semiotic characterization of designers' and users' activities that clarifies the tradeoffs involved in designing and choosing techniques in either approach. Central to this characterization is the role of intentions in what users mean to say and do when using computers. Our characterization is in line with a broader concept of usability, in which systems must support users' improvisation and creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assuming end-user development (EUD) is here to stay, we must begin to consider the economic, organizational and societal factors which would impact its adoption and use. Such studies have so far focused on the wider issues of IT adoption and users controlling information processing power (end-user computing), whilst EUD research has focused on the cognitive and technology aspects of programming by non-specialists. In this chapter we describe the start of a research programme addressing this gap. We present our findings from a pilot survey of researchers, practitioners and end-users conducted over several months in Spring/Summer 2003. The survey analysed two group discussions and 38 questionnaire returns to elicit organisational perceptions and views on End User Development, and to help formulate further research directions in the area, including an outline strategy for managing the integration of EUD. Key words. organizational factors, EUD acceptance, survey of EUD perceptions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An empirical case study highlights that software professionals develop and use specialized knowledge artifacts to improve the effectiveness of product design based on components-off-the-shelf integration. Computational counterparts of these artifacts improve the cooperative problem solving required by the design of applications fulfilling complex user requirements. Integration is likely to become a typical approach in EUD too, and tools supporting it are required. This chapter describes the outcomes of the case study. Lessons learned are discussed with regard to EUD, when it is interpreted as a creative discovery of components to be integrated. Key words. Knowledge Artifact, Software Integration, Design as Discovery [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The change of change applications to suit the needs of users in different places and facilitate development over time has long been a major challenge for software maintenance experts. In this chapter we take up tailoring as a means of making software flexible. Starting with two case studies— one taking up tailoring for different users and the other addressing changes over time—the article discusses problems related to both the use and development of a tailorable application. Developing tailorable software presents newchallenges: howdo you create a user-friendly tailoring interface? How do you decide what should be tailorable, and how do you create a software architecture that permits this? How do you ensure that the tailorable system gives acceptable performance? Our experience shows that the borders between maintenance and use become blurred since tailorability can replace maintenance by professional software engineers by tailoring by advanced users. Using our experience of the two selected cases, we identify and discuss five important issues to consider when designing and implementing tailorable systems in industrial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we depict collaborative aspects of tailoring software. We provide a categorization distinguishing between (at first) three levels of intensity of user ties regarding tools usage ("shared use," "shared context," and "shared tool") and discuss approaches to support collaborative tailoring in these scenarios. For the two levels with the most intense ties ("Shared Context" and "Shared Tool") we provide the relevant theoretical background as well as empirical evidence from our own fieldwork. Our taxonomy helps us to describe and address two important shortcomings of current tailoring environments. First, current considerations regarding tailorability usually address tailoring within one tool, while current work infrastructures (which we introduce as a forth scenario—"Shared Infrastructure"—in our taxonomy) require a thinking beyond one tool. Second, although studies on tailoring-in-practice and evolving use of organizational software show the importance of user-userinteraction in processes of technology configuration, this interaction was only treated as a side issue in the design of tailoring environments. Respecting the importance of that interaction, we suggest to stronger focus on opportunities to support those appropriation activities of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tailorability should enable users to fit computer systems to the application context. So tailoring options should be meaningful for end-users in their respective domains. This paper discusses how these design criteria can be realized within the technical framework of component-based tailorability. Component-based tailorability assumes that technical flexibility can be realized by allowing end-users to recompose components at runtime. To enable end-users to recompose components at runtime, the system has already appropriately broken down into modules at design time. Such a modularization of the software needs to meet two requirements: on the one hand it must provide sufficient flexibility with respect to the application context and on the other hand it must be understandable by the end-users. In an industrial case study we demonstrate how such a modularization can be established by applying ethnographic methods and choosing an appropriate design metaphor. The ethnographic study helps to capture tailoring needs of the application context. The design metaphor helps to break down software into components which are understandable by end-users. Subsequently, systematic interventions following an action research approach help to validate the design decisions. Key words. component based software engineering, anticipation of change, tailorability, case study, ethnography [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rewriting systems are popular in end-user programming because complex behavior can be described with few or no abstractions or variables. However, rewriting systems have been limited to manipulating non-rotatable objects on a grid, such as in Agentsheets or Stagecast Creator. Systems that allow free-form movement of objects must use other techniques, such as the sequential programming by demonstration in Squeak. Viscuit is a new rewriting system that introduces fuzzy rewriting, which allows freely positioned and rotated objects to interact using only rewriting rules. The result is a system that allows users to specify animations in a highly interactive way, without textual language or menu selections. Key words. animation, rewriting system, visual programming language [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent environments will be able to observe and sense the events that are happening around them. For these environments to become intelligent, however, they need to learn what appropriate and sensible behavior is in a given situation. The main challenge of ambient intelligent environments is not to physically integrate technology in the environment, but to socially integrate the system behavior into the fabric of everyday life. This means that an intelligent environment needs to be taught by its users how it should conduct and what position it should take. This paper will discuss two examples of end-user development in intelligent environments as a way to indicate the research challenges in this area. Key words. (end-user development), ambient intelligence, home experience, content awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe participatory programming as a process that spans design, programming, use and tailoring of software. This process, that includes end-users at each stage, integrates participatory design and programmability. Programmability, as a property that relies on a reflective architecture, aims to let the end-users evolve the tools themselves according to their current, specific needs, and to let them control better the way results are computed. We present an environment that results from this approach, called biok, developed for researchers in biology, which is both domain-oriented and open to full programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Information Society, end-users keep increasing very fast in number, as well as in their demand with respect to the activities they would like to perform with computer environments, without being obliged to become computer specialists. There is a great request to provide end-users with powerful and flexible environments, tailorable to the culture, skills, and needs of a very diverse end-user population. In this chapter, we discuss a framework for End-User Development and present our methodology for designing software environments that support the activities of a particular class of end-users, called domain-expert users, with the objective of making their work with the computer easier. Such environments are called Software Shaping Workshops, in analogy to artisan workshops: they provide users only with the necessary tools that allow them to accomplish their specific activities by properly shaping software artifacts without being lost in virtual space. Key words. end-user development, domain expert, user diversity, gain, co-evolution, implicit information, tacit knowledge, user notation, HCI model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter investigates entry barriers and approaches for facilitating end-user web application development with the particular focus on shaping web programming technology and tools according to end-users' expectations and natural mental models. Our underlying assumption and motivation is that given the right tools and techniques even nonprogrammers may become successfulweb application developers. The main target audience for this research are "casual"webmasters without programming experience—a group likely to be interested in building web applications. As an important subset of web applications we focus on supporting the development of basic data collection, storage and retrieval applications such as online registrations forms, staff databases, or report tools. Firstwe analyze the factors contributing to the complexity ofweb application development through surveys and interviews of experienced programmers; then we explore the "natural mental models" of potential end-user web developers, and finally discuss our particular design solutions for lowering entry barriers, as embodied by a proof-of-concept development tool, called Click. Furthermore, we introduce and evaluate the concept of "Design-at-Runtime"—a new technique for facilitating and accelerating the development-test cycle when building web-based applications. Key words. end user development, web applications [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural development aims to ease the development process of interactive software systems. This can be obtained through the use of familiar representations together with intelligent environments able to map them onto corresponding implementations of interactive systems. The main motivation for model-based approaches to user interface design has been to support development through the use of meaningful abstractions in order to avoid dealing with low-level details. Despite this potential benefit, their adoption has mainly been limited to professional designers. This paper shows how they should be extended in order to achieve natural development through environments that enable end-users to create or modify interactive applications still using conceptual models, but with continuous support that facilitates their development, analysis, and use. In particular, we discuss the application of the proposed criteria to the CTTE and TERESA environments, which support the design and development of multi-device interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexibility is one of the most striking features of modern software. As the idea of integrating components is easily understood by programmers as well as end users, component architectures seem to be very promising to serve as a technological basis. In this chapter we give an overview of our work in the last years. A component model called FLEXIBEANS has been designed with the special notion to develop highly flexible and tailorable applications. The FREEVOLVE platform then serves as an environment in which compositions can be run and tailored. The second part of the chapter deals with the development and evaluation of different tailoring environments in which end users can compose their own applications or tailor existing ones. Users tests showed that besides a coherent technical basis and a manageable visual tailoring environment, there is a need for additional support techniques. We discuss how techniques to support users' individual and collective tailoring activities can be integrated into the user interface. Key words. tailorability, platform, component architecture, user interface, collaborative tailoring, evalution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

End-user programming has become the most common form of programming in use today. Despite this growth, there has been little investigation into the correctness of the programs end-users create. We have been investigating ways to address this problem via a holistic approach we call enduser software engineering. The concept is to bring support for aspects of software development that happen beyond the "coding" stage—such as testing and debugging—together into the support that already exists for incremental, interactive programming by end-users. In this chapter, we present our progress on three aspects of end-user software engineering: systematic "white box" testing assisted by automatic test generation, assertions in a form of postconditions that also serve as preconditions, and fault localization.We also present our strategy for motivating end-user programmers to make use of the end-user software engineering devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last six years, we have been working to create programming languages and environments that are more natural, by which we mean closer to the way people think about their tasks. The goal is to make it possible for people to express their ideas in the same way they think about them. To achieve this, we performed various studies about howpeople think about programming tasks, and then used this knowledge to develop a new programming language and environment called HANDS. This chapter provides an overviewof the goals and background for the Natural Programming research, the results of some of our user studies, and the highlights of the language design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We think that over the next few years, the goal of interactive systems and services will evolve from just making systems easy to use (even though that goal has not yet been completely achieved) to making systems that are easy to develop by end users. By now, most people have become familiar with the basic functionality and interfaces of computers, but they are not able to manage any programming language. Therefore, they cannot develop new applications or modify current ones according to their needs. In order to address such challenges it is necessary a new paradigm, based on a multidisciplinary approach involving several types of expertise, such as software engineering, human-computer interaction, CSCW, which are now rather fragmented and with little interaction. The resulting methods and tools can provide results useful across many application domains, such as ERP, multi-device services (accessible through both mobile and stationary devices), and professional applications. Key words. tailorability, end user programming, flexibility, usability [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As information technology continues to spread, we believe that there will be an increasing awareness of a fundamental need to seriously consider privacy concerns, and that doing so will require an understanding of policies that govern information use accompanied by development of technologies that can implement such policies. The research reported here describes our efforts to design a system which facilitates effective privacy policy authoring, implementation, and compliance monitoring. We employed a variety of user-centered design methods with 109 target users across the four steps of the research reported here. This case study highlights our work to iteratively design and validate a prototype with target users, and presents a laboratory evaluation aimed at providing early support for specific design decisions to meet the needs of providing flexible privacy enabling technologies. This paper highlights our work to include natural language and structured entry methods for policy authoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a lightweight tool to compare the relevance ranking provided by a search engine to the relevance as actually judged by the user performing the query. Using the tool, we conducted a user study with two different versions of the search engine for a large corporate web site with more than 1.8 million pages, and with the popular search engine GoogleTM. Our tool provides an inexpensive and efficient way to do this comparison, and can be easily extended to any search engine that provides an API. Relevance feedback from actual users can be used to assess precision and recall of a search engine's retrieval algorithms and, perhaps more importantly, to tune its relevance ranking algorithms to better match user needs. We found the tool to be quite effective at comparing different versions of the same search engine, and for benchmarking by comparing against a standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]