Abstract
End-user developers are identified by their difference from (ordinary) developers. This difference is both a matter of definition, and an essential starting point for investigation. So the question arises how are they different? Since there are so many more non-developers in the world than developers, it seems likely that the differences among end-user developers may be even larger than the difference between (ordinary) developers and end-user developers. This chapter will review these individual differences, to the extent that they have been addressed in the research literature. These differences influence and are determined by education and training, differences in professional and domestic settings, differences in personality and intrinsic motivation, and differences in work practices and habits of thinking. All of these differences between individuals present questions for future investigation in end-user development research, and also opportunities for design of tools and systems that support end-user developers in different ways.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aghaee, S., Blackwell, A. F., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. (2015). Personality and intrinsic motivational factors in end-user programming. In Z. Li, C. Ermel, S. D. Fleming (Eds). Proceedings of IEEE symposium on visual languages and human centric computing (VL/HCC 2015), Atlanta, GA (pp. 29–36). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE.
Bandura, A. (1994). Self-efficacy. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Beckwith, L., Burnett, M., Grigoreanu, V., Wiedenbeck, S. (2006). Gender hci: what about the software? Computer, 39(11), 97–101.
Beckwith, L., Kissinger, C., Burnett, B., Wiedenbeck, S., Lawrance, J., Blackwell, A., et al. (2006). Tinkering and gender in end-user programmers’ debugging. In Proceedings of CHI 2006 (pp. 231–240).
Blackwell, A. F. (2002). First steps in programming: a rationale for Attention Investment models. Proceedings of the IEEE symposia on humancentric computing languages and environments, Arlington, VA (pp. 2–10). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE.
Blackwell, A. F., Rode, J. A., Toye, E. F. (2009). How do we program the home? Gender, attention investment, and the psychology of programming at home. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 67, 324–341.
Collins, N., & McLean, A. (2014). Algorave: A survey of the history, aesthetics and technology of live performance of algorithmic electronic dance music. In Proceedings of 14th international conference on new interfaces for musical expression, B. Caramiaux, K. Tahiroğlu, R. Fiebrink, A. Tanaka (Eds.). (pp. 355–359). London: Goldsmiths University.
Cypher, A. (1991). Eager: programming repetitive tasks by example. In S. P. Robertson, G. M. Olson, J. S. Olson (Eds.). Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI'91), New Orleans LA (pp. 33–39). New York: ACM.
Dijkstra, E. W. (1970). Notes on structured programming. Eindhoven Netherlands: Technological University.
Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender. London: Icon.
Harper, R., Randall, D., Sharrock, W. (2016). Choice. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Hill, C., Ernst, S., Oleson, A., Horvath, S., Burnett, M. (2016). GenderMag experiences in the field: the whole, the parts, and the workload. In A. Blackwell, B. Plimmer, G. Stapleton (Eds.). Proceedings of the IEEE symposium on visual languages and human-centric computing, Cambridge, UK (pp. 199–207). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE.
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: history, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 2(1999), 102–138.
Kelleher, C., & Pausch, R. (2006). Lessons learned from designing a programming system to support middle school girls creating animated stories. In J. Grundy, J. Howse (Eds.). Proceedings of the IEEE symposium on visual languages and human-centric computing, Brighton, UK (pp. 165–172). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE.
Kelleher, C., Pausch, R., Kiesler, S. (2007). Storytelling Alice motivates middle school girls to learn computer programming. In M. B. Rosson, D. Gilmore (Eds.). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'07), San Jose, CA (pp. 1455–1464). New York: ACM.
Kosinski, M., Matz, S., Gosling, S., Popov, V., Stillwell, D. (2015). Facebook as a social science research tool: opportunities, challenges, ethical considerations and practical guidelines. American Psychologist, 70(6), 543–556.
Leonard, T. C., Thaler, R. H., Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Constitutional Political Economy, 19(4), 356–360.
MacLean, A., Carter, K., Lövstrand, L., Moran, T. (1990). User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons. In J. C. Chew, J. Whiteside (Eds.). Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI'90), Seattle WA (pp. 175–182). New York: ACM.
Margolis, J. (2013). Stuck in the shallow end: education, race and computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Margolis, J., & Fisher, A. (2003). Unlocking the clubhouse. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mehandjiev, N., Sutcliffe, A., Lee, D. (2006). Organisational view of end-user development. In H. Lieberman, F. Paterno, V. Wulf (Eds.). End user development. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer.
Quercia, D., Las Casas, D. B., Pesce, J. P., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M., Almeida, V., et al. (2012). Facebook and privacy: the balancing act of personality, gender, and relationship currency. In N. Ellison, J. G. Shanahan, Z. Tufekci (Eds.). Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Dublin (pp. 306–313). Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press.
Rowe, M. B. (1978). Teaching science as continuous inquiry. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Scheib, V., Engell-Nielsen, T., Lehtinen, S., Haines, E., Taylor, P. (2002). The demo scene. In T. Appolloni (Ed.). ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference abstracts and applications (pp. 96–97). New York: ACM.
Shneiderman, B. (1982). The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation. Behaviour & Information Technology, 1(3), 237–256.
Wilson, A., Burnett, M., Beckwith, L., Granatir, O., Casburn, L., Cook, C., et al. (2003). Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming. In G. Cockton, Panu Korhonen (Eds.). Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI’03), Ft. Lauderdale, FL (pp. 305–312). New York: ACM.
Woolford, K., Blackwell, A. F., Norman, S. J., Chevalier, C. (2010). Crafting a critical technical practice. Leonardo, 43(2), 202–203.
Wulf, V., & Golombek, B. (2001). Direct activation: a concept to encourage tailoring activities. Behaviour & Information Technology, 20(4), 249–263.
Wulf, V., & Jarke, M. (2004). The economics of end-user development. Communications of the ACM, 47(9), 41–42.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Blackwell, A.F. (2017). End-User Developers – What Are They Like?. In: Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (eds) New Perspectives in End-User Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60291-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60291-2_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60290-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60291-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)