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Making End User Development More Natural

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New Perspectives in End-User Development

Abstract

When end users approach a development task, they bring with them a set of techniques, expressions, and knowledge, which can be leveraged in order to make the process easier. The Natural Programming Project has been working for over twenty years to better understand how end users think about their tasks, and to develop new ways for users to express those tasks that will be more “natural,” by which we mean closer to the way they think. Our chapter in the previous book covered the first 10 years of this research; and here we summarize the most recent 10 years. This includes studies on barriers that impede EUD, and a new tool that helps with the understanding and debugging barriers by showing developers why their program has its current behavior. We also describe a tool that we created to help EUDs input, process, and transform data in the context of spreadsheets and web pages. Interaction designers are a class of EUDs that may need to program interactive behaviors, so we studied how they naturally express those behaviors, and then built a spreadsheet-like tool to allow them to author new behaviors. Another spreadsheet tool we created helps EUDs access web service data without writing code, and extends the familiar spreadsheet to support analyzing the acquired web-based hierarchical data and programming data-driven GUI applications. Finally, EUDs often need to engage in exploratory programming, where the goals and tasks are not well-formed in advance. We describe new tools to help users selectively undo past actions, along with on-going research to help EUDs create more efficient behaviors on smartphones and facilitate variations when performing data analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Gneiss is a type of rock, pronounced like “nice.” Here it stands for Gathering Novel End-user Internet Services using Spreadsheets.

  2. 2.

    Azurite is a blue mineral, and here stands for Adding Zest to Undoing and Restoring Improves Textual Exploration.

  3. 3.

    Variolite, which is a kind of rock structure, here stands for Variations Augment Real Iterative Outcomes Letting Information Transcend Exploration.

  4. 4.

    Sugilite is named after a purple gemstone, and here stands for Smartphone Users Generating Intelligent Likable Interfaces Through Examples.

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Acknowledgements

This article grows out of over 20 years of work by the Natural Programming group by more than 50 students, staff and postdocs in addition to the authors, and we thank them all for their contributions. The work summarized here has been funded at least by SAP, Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo! and multiple NSF grants including CNS-1423054, IIS-1314356, IIS-1116724, IIS-0329090, CCF-0811610, IIS-0757511, and CCR-0324770. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any of the sponsors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

    Brad A. Myers, Mary Beth Kery & Toby Jia-Jun Li

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States

    Andrew J. Ko

  3. Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, United States

    Chris Scaffidi

  4. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States

    Stephen Oney

  5. Google, Mountain View, CA, United States

    YoungSeok Yoon

  6. IBM, Armonk, NY, United States

    Kerry Chang

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  1. Brad A. Myers
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  2. Andrew J. Ko
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  4. Stephen Oney
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  5. YoungSeok Yoon
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  6. Kerry Chang
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  7. Mary Beth Kery
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  8. Toby Jia-Jun Li
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Correspondence to Brad A. Myers .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ISTI - C. N. R. , Pisa, Italy

    Fabio Paternò

  2. FB 5, Wirtschaftsinf.k u. N. Medien, Universität Siegen FB 5, Wirtschaftsinf.k u. N. Medien, Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Volker Wulf

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Myers, B.A. et al. (2017). Making End User Development More Natural. In: Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (eds) New Perspectives in End-User Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60291-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60291-2_1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60291-2

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