Final Research Presentation

The Wonderful World of End User Design

Agenda

• Principles

• Practice

• Workflow– Automator

• Creative Simulation– Second Life

• Programming– Programming By Example

• Quality Issues

• Social Issues Revisited

• Future Directions

WHY EUD?

In his widely read Software Design Manifesto a few yearsago Mitchell Kapor bemoaned the fact that“Despite the enormous outward success of personalcomputers, the daily experience of using computersfar too often is still fraught with difficulty, pain, andbarriers for most people …………………………………….

The lack of usability of software and poor design of programs is the secret shame of the industry.”

WHY EUD? (2)

“The time is ripe to address designing as a

coherent activity—technical, cognitive, social, organizational, and cultural.

• August 1995 …. the first Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems

EUD Principles and Tradeoffs

• Complexity vs. Flexibility (or General Purpose vs. Domain-Specific)

• Design Freedom vs. Need for Control

• Motivation to Learn vs. Need to Add Immediate Value

• Rise of the Graphical Design Worlds – Transparency vs.Specificity

Reducing Expertise Tension

System

Knowledge

Low

Hi

Domain Knowledge Hi

IT Expert

Metaphors Intelligent

Systems

Easy Dev Tools

Hi Level

Semantics

Simplified Software Development Environ-ments

Replacement Domain Models

Domain Specific

Tools to Alleviate Tension

• Lack Systems Knowledge- Simplified Function Set- Hi Level Primitives- Wizards

• Lack Domain Knowledge - Metaphors/Replacement Domains- Best Practice Templates- Semantic Build Blocks w/ Ontologies- Wizards

Biases of EUs that Need to be Addressed in EUD Tool Design

• Tend to collect only enough information needed to make a decision, not necessarily the best one

• Tend to use the tools that let us reach our short-term goals the quickest, regardless of their impact on our long-term goals

• If users comfortable with a language construct, method call or other tool, they often tried to use it in inappropriate ways when they perceived a high cost in finding and learning a new one

• Sheer number of ways to implement a behavior in a visual tool is a problem

Implications - EUD Tool Design

• Design tools that help end-user designers attend to “important” details

• Have the tool provide a more objective & exhaustive list of possible explanations and have end users choose from it

• Tools could generate to-do list items automatically by, for example, identifying unhandled cases in set of conditionals, note procedures that have yet to be called

• Example …. Whyline, a debugging tool that lets end users ask questions about their program’s failures in terms of its output and behavior

EUD in Practice

• Workflow

• Simulated Interaction

• EUD Programming Aids

EUD Tools

• Automator in OSX 10.4– Meet Otto

• Tool for repetitive tasks• Scriptable application

– Components• Action• Sequential Workflow• Graphical interface

Action

• Building blocks of a workflow (Lego)• Item that performs single task (Agent)

– Single input and output

• Two types of action– Not require Input– Require Input

Workflow

• Document of how to accomplish a task

• Consists of a series of action objects

• Reusable, sharable

• No conditionals/ branching

Automator• Design environment

Actions Added

Action Library:Categorize different actions

by applications

Actions:All the available actions

Related to a certainApplication

Workflow spaceInformation window:provides the detail

description of actions

Run/Stop button

Example Workflows

• Repeatedly Tasks– Rename a bunch of

files– Resize a bunch of

pictures

Thoughts about Automator(1)

• Pros– Visual programming(workflow)– Program by example/Intermediate stable

status: online community support– Improve productivity– Enrich the existing OSX system

Thoughts on Automator(2)

• Limitations:– Can’t find the actions I need, now what?

• Not ease for end user to create their own actions

• Provide a solution to find the right action locally or online

– Need more feedback/ critiques in the design process• Need error prevention/ guidance

– To choose the right action

• Better Debugging tools?

– No conditionals/branching(complexity vs. flexibility)

Resources for Automator

• http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/

• http://www.automatorworld.com/

• http://www.automator.us/

• http://developer.apple.com/macosx/automator.html

EUD Simulation Tools

Second Life - stated goal of creator is to create a world like the metaverse described in Snow Crash - Privately-owned, subscription-based multiplayer on-line game- Gives its users tools to add to and edit its world and participate in its economy- Majority of the content in the Second Life world is resident-created- Concept that residents retain the intellectual rights to objects they create though they are required to offer creator an open license

Second Life

Linden Lab

What is it?

• 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its users

• Went public in 2003 and presently has 100,000 users

• Digital continent that you occupy and meet people, build communities, start businesses, and build your own house

• Residents retain the rights to their digital creations- buy, sell, trade property

What is it?

• Commerce: Linden dollar can be converted to US Dollar

• Residents create their own virtual goods and services

• Fully integrated economy designed to reward risk, innovation, and craftsmanship**

Create Yourself

Buy Land

Meet Friends & Build Communities

Have Fun

Second Life

• Residents are represented in the environment by an avatar

• Residents can upload and implement animations for their avatars

• Common applications of altering character appearance have included animals, robots, mechs, furries and avatars totally non-humanoid

Second Life

• Includes a built-in object editor tool that allows residents to create complex objects out of a set of basic primitives

• Environment includes a set of textures that users can apply to their objects

• Residents can upload and apply their own images as well

Second Life

• Comprised of rich, diverse, user-driven subcultures and countercultures

• Groups can be created by any user • Group activity is usually centered on a particular

interest, so creating groups can give people a common ground for discussion

• Has its own economy/currency• Residents receive an amount and a weekly

stipend thereafter. Additional monies acquired by selling objects or services in economy

Second Life

• Various companies have used Second Life as a platform to enhance various aspects of their businesses. Some have built large-scale games around their brand while others are in the process of integrating Second Life into their operations as a communication and collaboration tool.

Second Life

- The Synthetic Environments for Emergency Response Simulation (SEERS) project aims to provide cost effective mission rehearsal and virtual prototyping tools for the emergency response community.

- The project, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is part of the core research program of the Emergency Readiness and Response Research Center (ER3C) at Dartmouth College's Institute for Security Technology Studies.

Second Life

• Second Life SEERS

Second Life

• SEERS Simulation

Second Life

• SEERS Simulation

Second Life – Beyond Gaming

• A way for business school students to test entrepreneurial talents in riskless space

• British organization (ARCI) using it to help abused children work on socialization, collaboration, team building, etc.

• Project live2give …….. nine adults with cerebral palsy, seeks to provide a forum in which they can share in everyday personal interactions most people take for granted. They share an avatar & get to experience being around other people without being judged

• Platform for creating synthetic environments for Home-land Security to test emergency response scenarios

Second Life – Beyond Gaming(2)

• Some companies and organizations are taking advantages of the possibilities offered by the Metaverse and building VR intranets and extranets in SL

• A firm has built virtual office and entertainment space, and uses it as a workspace for its staff (intranet) and a marketing and sales point for its customers (extranet).

• Marketing presentations, university lectures and business meetings in SL can be very close to the "real thing", with the added value that the organizers, and the participants, can save a lot of money and time.

SL as an EUD Environment

• Provides range of software tools, including a visual programming language

• Gives participants the power to create artifacts according to their own designs

• Provides access to a community of participants to explore ideas and test out approaches in a riskless atmosphere

• Intended to be a canvas, rather than a world that constrains residents to a specific theme or style

SL as an EUD Environment

• Open source technologies such as Apache and squid are already being used

• Built-in instant messaging system will be replaced with Jabber

• Current proprietary built-in virtual machine will be replaced with Mono

• Cultural anthropologist, Thomas Malaby at UW, Madison, is studying Second Life to understand the "relationships among modernity, unpredictability, and technology, particularly as they are realized through such processes." (Source: http://www.uwm.edu/~malaby/ )

Criticisms of SL

• While more open than most virtual world on-line environments …… still restrictive

• The environment can be is complex to navigate …… “…… took me 3 hours to figure out how to walk ……”

• Reflection space may be biased depend-ing on the diversity of the community

http://www.secondlife.com

Programming By Example

• Create programs by giving examples of their behavior

• Work with specific examples rather than describing the problem in abstract

• Relies on the system's ability to generalize from examples

• Programmer presents examples of data before and after processing; system finds method of transforming input to output

PBE - Examples

• Mondrian - user interface that allows a domain expert (not a programmer) to construct representations of objects and procedures from a video of a human performing an example procedure

• Tinker - permits a novice coder to write Lisp

programs by providing examples of input data, and typing Lisp expressions or providing mouse input that directs the system how to handle each example; system records the steps formulates program to handle the general case.

PBE – Ready for Prime Time?

Inferencing Systems - Unreliable• Easy for EUs to put instructions into system• Limited control over the behavior that comes out

Inferencing Systems - Cumbersome• Instructing system requires more knowledge,

planning and effort• User has more control, but can get inundated in

the process of creating programs

Quality Issues

• How to compensate for lack of QA and test skills in the typical end user

• How to ensure software quality and maintainability as more of the burden of design is shifted to the end user designer

• More training and more versatile and targeted QA and testing tools for EU designers

Social Challenges

• How to motivate end users

• How to provide environments that allow acquisition of social capital tied to performance and contributions

• How to mitigate the control issues and realign the traditional roles of developer and end user

Future Directions for EUD

• Better visual programming systems

• More agent based systems

• More interactive systems that know the user and learn from him/her (more intelligent scaffolding)

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