End-User Development in Social Psychology Research: Factors for Adoption

Abstract

Psychology researchers employ the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to capture thoughts and behaviours of participants within their everyday lives. Smartphone-based ESM apps are increasingly used in such research. However, the diversity of researchers' app requirements, coupled with cost and complexity of their implementation, has prompted end-user development (EUD) approaches. In addition, limited evaluation of such environments beyond lab-based usability studies precludes discovery of factors pertaining to real-world EUD adoption. We first describe the extension of Jeeves, our visual programming environment for ESM app creation, in which we implemented additional functional requirements, derived from a survey and analysis of previous work. We further describe interviews with psychology researchers to understand their practical considerations for employing this extended environment in their work practices. Results of our analysis are presented as factors pertaining to the adoption of EUD activities within and between communities of practice.

End-User Development of Experience Sampling Smartphone Apps -Recommendations and Requirements

“…Our previous work described Jeeves in relation to EUD adoption requirements for psychology researchers [21], as well as how usability issues in a lab study of Jeeves were almost entirely separate to real-world usability challenges identified in case studies [22]. In this work, we extend on both of these results by triangulating interview feedback with analysis of our case studies.…”

“…In response, we have developed the Jeeves tool to allow end-users with no programming skills to create their own ESM apps, couple them to participants' smartphones, and receive assessment results in real-time. While our previous work has addressed design decisions and lab-based usability studies of Jeeves [20,22], this paper extends the evaluation conducted in [21] to synthesise necessary functionality and constraints of EUD for ESM apps (hereby referred to as EUD-ESM) addressing the following question:…”

Challenges of Traditional Usability Evaluation in End-User Development

“…Recent additions to the library of Jeeves blocks include participant "attribute" blocks, akin to programmatic variables, conditional statement blocks, and context-sensitive triggers. These extensions were derived from a review of literature detailing the potential benefits of modern smartphone ESM, and were positively received by interviewed psychology researchers [20]. However, the researchers who were interviewed did not actually use Jeeves.…”

“…Nielsen's guidelines on designing study tasks were followed closely, by ensuring that participants were not primed with the trigger-action terminology of Jeeves [16]. The tasks were intended to address updated functions of Jeeves that were perceived as useful for researchers to create personalised ESM study specifications [20] -primarily the use of "attribute" blocks to represent variables, as well as conditional statements. Note that the hypothetical app end-users are referred to in study tasks as patients rather than participants, to distinguish them from the participants in this study.…”