The trend towards mobile devices usage has put more than ever the Web as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kind of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with "native" mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These native applications might offer further (e.g. location-based) functionalities to their users in comparison with their corresponding Web sites, because they were developed with mobile features in mind. However, most Web applications have not this native mobile counterpart and users access them using browsers in the mobile device. Users might eventually want to add mobile features on these Web sites even though those features were not supported originally. In this paper we present a novel approach to allow end users to augment their preferred Web sites with mobile features. This end-user approach is supported by a framework for mobile Web augmentation that we describe in the paper. We also present a set of supporting tools and a validation experiment with end users.

Building Mobile Web or Hypermedia Applications is usually difficult since there is a myriad of issues to take into account. Moreover adding support for personalized or context-aware behaviors goes far beyond the possibilities of many kinds of organizations that intend to build this kind of software (museums, city halls, etc). In this article we present a novel approach to delegate part of the effort in building mobile Web software to developers outside those organizations or even to final users. We show that this approach is feasible, light and practical and present a set of experiments we developed to verify our claims.

The World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user's primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find complementary information allowing to complete another task. In this paper, we explore primary and/or ancillary search tasks and propose an approach for simplifying the user interaction during search tasks. Rather than focusing on dedicated search engines, our approach allows the user to abstract search engines already provided by Web applications into pervasive search services that will be available for performing searches from any other Web site. We also propose to allow users to manage the way in which searching results are displayed and the interaction with them. In order to illustrate the feasibility of this approach, we have built a support tool based on a plug-in architecture that allows users to integrate new search services (created by themselves by means of visual tools) and execute them in the context of both kinds of searches. A case study illustrates the use of these tools. We also present the results of two evaluations that demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and the benefits in its use.

In this paper we present a user experience report on a Group Decision Support System. The used system is a Collaborative framework called GRoUp Support (GRUS). The experience consists in three user tests conducted in three different countries. While the locations are different, all three tests were run in the same conditions: same facilitator and tested process. In order to support the end-users. we teach the system in two different ways: a presentation of the system, and a video demonstrating how to use it. The main feedback of this experience is that the teaching step for using Collaborative tools in mandatory. The experience was conducted in the context of decision-making in the agriculture domain.

In the past decades recommender systems have become a powerful tool to improve personalization on the Web. Yet, many popular websites lack such functionality, its implementation usually requires certain technical skills, and, above all, its introduction is beyond the scope and control of end-users. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents a novel tool to empower end-users without programming skills, without any involvement of website providers, to embed personalized recommendations of items into arbitrary websites on client-side. For this we have developed a generic meta-model to capture recommender system configuration parameters in general as well as in a web augmentation context. Thereupon, we have implemented a wizard in the form of an easy-to-use browser plug-in, allowing the generation of so-called user scripts, which are executed in the browser to engage collaborative filtering functionality from a provided external rest service. We discuss functionality and limitations of the approach, and in a study with end-users we assess the usability and show its suitability for combining recommender systems with web augmentation techniques, aiming to empower end-users to implement controllable recommender applications for a more personalized browsing experience.

Web augmentation is a set of techniques allowing users to define and execute software which is dependent on the presentation layer of a concrete Web page. Through the use of specialized Web augmentation artifacts, the end users may satisfy several kinds of requirements that were not considered by the analysts, developers and stakeholders that built the application. Although some augmentation approaches are contemplating a server-side counterpart (to support aspects such as collaboration or crossbrowser session management), the augmentation artifacts are usually purely client-side. The server-side support increases the capabilities of the augmentations, since it may allow sharing information among users and devices. So far, this support is often defined and developed in an ad hoc way. Although it is clear that server-side support brings new possibilities, it is also true that developing and deploying server-side Web applications is a challenging task that end users hardly may handle. This work presents a novel approach for designing Web augmentation applications based on client-side and server-side components. We propose a model-driven approach that raises the abstraction level of both, client-and server-side developments. We provide a set of tools for designing the composition of the core application with new features on the back-end and the augmentation of pages in the front-end. The usability and the value of the produced augmentations have been evaluated through two experiments involving 30 people in total. KeywordsModel-driven Web engineering • Augmentation • Web development • Separation of concern Communicated by Prof. Joerg Kienzle.

OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/ Eprints ID : 18846The contribution was presented at ICWE 2016 :http://icwe2016.inf.usi.ch/ Abstract. The Personal Web arose to empower end users with the ability to drive and integrate the Web by themselves, according to their own interests. This is usually achieved through Web Augmentation, Mashups or Personal Information Managers (PIM), but despite the diversity of approaches, there are still scenarios that require to be solved through the combination of their features, which implies the end user knowing diverse tools and being able to coordinate them. This paper presents WOA, a platform conceived under the foundations of the Personal Web for supporting the harvesting and materialization of information objects from existing Web content, and their enhancement through the addition of specialized behaviour. This makes it possible to conceive multiple Web information objects coexisting in a same space of information and offering the end user with different modes of interaction, therefore, with multiple kinds of personal Web experiences.

Nowadays, the development of Web applications supporting distributed user interfaces (DUI) is straightforward. However, it is still hard to find Web sites supporting this kind of user interaction. Although studies on this field have demonstrated that DUI would improve the user experience, users are not massively empowered to manage these kinds of interactions. In this setting, we propose to move the responsibility of distributing both the UI and user interaction, from the application (a Web application) to the client (the Web browser), giving also rise to inter-application interaction distribution. This paper presents a platform for client-side DUI, built on the foundations of Web augmentation and End User Development. The idea is to empower end users to apply an augmentation layer over existing Web applications, considering both frequent use and opportunistic DUI requirements. In this work, we present the architecture and a prototype tool supporting this approach and illustrate the incorporation of some DUI features through case studies.