Give the people what they want: studying end-user needs for enhancing the web

Abstract

End-user programming (EUP) is a common approach for helping ordinary people create small programs for their professional or daily tasks. Since end-users may not have programming skills or strong motivation for learning them, tools should provide what end-users want with minimal costs of learning –i.e., they must decrease the barriers to entry. However, it is often hard to address these needs, especially for fast-evolving domains such as the Web. To better understand these existing and ongoing challenges, we conducted two formative studies with Web users –a semi-structured interview study, and a Wizard-of-Oz study. The interview study identifies challenges that participants have with their daily experiences on the Web. The Wizard-of-Oz study investigates how participants would naturally explain three computational tasks to an interviewer acting as a hypothetical computer agent. These studies demonstrate a disconnect between what end-users want and what existing EUP systems support, and thus open the door for a path towards better support for end user needs. In particular, our findings include: (1) analysis of challenges that end-users experience on the Web with solutions; (2) seven core functionalities of EUP for addressing these challenges; (3) characteristics of non-programmers describing three common computation tasks; (4) design implications for future EUP systems.

Keywords

• End-user programming
• User study
• Wizard-of-Oz study
• World-Wide Web