Understanding End-User Development of Context-Dependent Applications in Smartphones

Abstract

We are using our mobile devices in an increasing number of dynamic contexts, thus we need more and more context-dependent applications. However, only end users can know the most appropriate ways their applications should react to contextual events. In order to facilitate end user development of context-dependent applications in smartphones a first generation of mobile environments has been proposed in the market. In this work we analyse three such Android applications in terms of their ability to express the relevant concepts and their usability, also through a user study. We indicate some limitations of the current solutions and provide indications that can support future work for providing more effective results.

Engineering context-aware systems and applications: A survey

“…These, only need to handle simplified if-then programming rules that match a trigger with an action. Is starting to emerge in areas such as smart-homes/buildings [177] or smartphones [178]. Services and applications such as IFTTT 11 or Tasker 12 let end-users create rules with sensors/devices that they already have and use in their daily life.…”

Analysing How Users Prefer to Model Contextual Event-Action Behaviours in Their Smartphones

“…An input for our work has been a recent study [6] on how three Android Apps (Tasker 2 , Locale 3 , and Atooma 4 ) aim to support non-professional developers in creating context-dependent applications by exploiting the smartphones' sensors and capabilities. The analysis of the three environments has been carried out from two viewpoints: expressiveness (to what extent they support the relevant concepts); and usability (for which a user study has been carried out).…”

“…In this paper we discuss a recent study that carried out a comparative assessment of three Android apps in terms of expressiveness and usability [6]. We then report on a follow-up card sorting study that aimed to better identify how users logically organise the concepts supported by such apps.…”

Smart Home Control through Unwitting Trigger-Action Programming

“…From this analysis, Tasker resulted to be the only tool able to satisfy most of the design principles (six out of seven). However, as also underlined in [17], Tasker appeared as more suitable to users with some knowledge in computer programming than to actual end users. In this paper, we propose a different approach to the creation of ECA rules, which, on the one hand, is aimed to be powerful enough for modeling a huge variety of home behaviors, and on the other hand, would like to support users performing such programming activity in an unwitting manner, as advocated in [20].…”

“…Ur and colleagues [8] have proved that IFTTT has a pretty usable interface to create rules, even though these can contain only one event or condition, and only one action. Lucci and Paternò [17] have compared Tasker, Locale and Atooma, all allowing the user to create rules with complex antecedent and consequent parts. In this study, Tasker resulted the best tool in terms of expressiveness and Atooma resulted the easiest to use by end users.…”