Interaction and End-User Programming with a Context-Aware Mobile Application

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we present the user interface design and evaluation of a tool for customizing mobile phone applications with context-aware features. The tool enables the user to program a set of context-action rules, defining the behavior of the device when a selected context is recognized and/or some other user-defined conditions are met. The tool user interface design is described starting from an early paper prototype and its evaluation, leading to a functional software implementation in a mobile phone. Finally, the usability evaluation of the functional prototype, and other relevant findings from the user test, are presented.

A UI-Centric Approach for the End-User Development of Multidevice Mashups

“…In the field of EUD of mobile applications, some approaches investigated the possibility of authoring mobile apps directly on the mobile devices [Häkkilä et al 2005;; however, especially due to the well-known screen limitations of such devices, the proposed editors enable the configuration of very simple applications, the so-called microservices , with poor contents and functions and not addressing at all the composition of remote services and APIs. Recently proposed services, like IFTTT (If This Than That, https://ifttt.com/wtf) and Atooma (http://www.automa.com), enable users to synchronize the behavior of different apps through simple conditional statements.…”

A mobile-based solution for supporting end-users in the composition of services

“…Context Studio [Häkkilä et al 2005] allows creating applications that activate mobile functions when a defined context-action rule is satisfied. The UI provided to define such rules is based on lists where the end-user first selects the action to perform (e.g., switching to mute or launching the camera), and then the trigger (e.g.,…”

Keep Doing What I Just Did: Automating Smartphones by Demonstration

“…This is the same approach used in one of the first researches to support users in specifying context-action rules for automating mobile phone tasks (Häkkilä et al, 2005). Both the CITA system (Ravindranath et al, 2012) Some researches and tools target the development of more generic mobile applications by end-users.…”

“…The idea of using PbD to create automation rules in context-aware system is not new and has been mentioned in the past as an interesting solution to investigate (Häkkilä et al, 2005). It has also been implemented in a smart environment prototyping tool named a CAPpella (Dey et al, 2004), which employs machine learning for generalizing rules from user actions and requires small amounts of time and data to produce reasonable activity recognizers.…”

“…Currently, aside from manually writing the code, which is not interesting for end users who have little or no programming experience, the most common (although inefficient) option is to manually select predefined conditions and actions to configure the automation rules (Häkkilä et al, 2005;Ravindranath et al, 2012). Most of the commercial smartphone automation solutions nowadays rely on the latter approach.…”