Automating tasks can make a smartphone easier to use and more battery efficient. However, currently little work has been done to help end-users to create such automations. In this paper, we explore an approach for automating smartphone tasks by demonstration. We have developed a mobile application called Keep Doing It that continuously records users' interactions with their smartphones. After users performed a task that they would like to automate, they can ask our application to create the automation based on their latest actions. Since users only have to use their smartphones, as they would naturally do, to demonstrate automations, we believe that our approach can lower the barrier for creating smartphone automations. Overall, an initial evaluation of the approach suggests that users would be willing to automate their phones by demonstration.
Abstract. Evaluating cross-platform systems is challenging due to the different constraints and capabilities of each platform. In this paper we extend the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM), a Semiotic Engineering evaluation method, to evaluate cross-platform systems. We introduce the term cross-communicability to denote the quality of the meta-communication of the system as whole, taking into account the user traversal between the different platforms. To assess crosscommunicability, we describe a novel approach to conduct the SIM, which introduces a contrastive analysis of the designer-to-user meta-communication messages of each platform, based on a semiotic framing of design changes initially proposed for End-User Development. The results from an analytical study indicate that this approach is capable of identifying and classifying several potential communication breakdowns particular to cross-platform systems, which in turn can inform the design or redesign of a cross-platform application.
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