This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.
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.
ObjectiveThe idea is to replace fixed, pre-packaged applications with flexible composition environments that, thanks to a separation among data, functions and presentations, make interactive environments "emerge" at run-time based on composition actions performed by end users. MethodsThis paper describes an approach for the lightweight construction of integrated, situational work-spaces pervasively accessible and sharable through a variety of devices. Specific emphasis is posed on the adoption of a composition paradigm that abstract from technical details and can be thus used by non-technical users. Thanks to the separation of concerns on which we ground the composition paradigm, the overall approach and its enabling platform are also amenable to customization with respect to the requirements of specific domains. ResultsA platform, based on service composition technologies, has been developed; it implements a meta-design approach to allow end users, not necessarily experts of technologies, to extract contents from heterogeneous sources and compose Personal Information Spaces (PISs) that satisfy their information needs and that can be pervasively executed on different devices. ConclusionWe proposed an approach where the composition platform enables the extraction of content from heterogeneous services, and the integration of the extracted content into situational applications where content presentation is flexibly managed through different visualization templates. PracticeThe developed prototypes have been evaluated in studies in which real users (e.g. guides of an archaeological park) were observed in action. ImplicationsThe results provided hints for refining the prototypes, and pose the basis for future work related to the identification of design principles that can make composition technologies more useful and usable for the end users.
software Shaping Workshops (SSWs) described in this paper are s o f i a r e environments designed to support various activities of End-User Development (EUD) and tailoring. A design methodolog). to create easy-todevelop-and-tailor Visual Interactive Svstems that are organised asSSWs is illustrated. Users of an interactive system are in many cases experts in some domain different from Computer Science, who need to perform some task with the aid ofthe computer system. The design methodalagv allows users to directly collaborate to the system design and tailoring process to face co-evolution of users and systems. The srrategv feasibility is discussed, outlining its implementation through a web-based prototype.
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