What Makes End-User Development Tick? 13 Design Guidelines

Abstract

End-user development (EUD) has enormous potential to make computers more useful in a large variety of contexts by providing people without any formal programming training increased control over information processing tasks. This variety of contexts poses a challenge to EUD system designers. No individual system can hope to address all of these challenges. The field of EUD is likely to produce a plethora of systems fitting specific needs of computer end-users. The goal of this chapter is not to advocate a kind of universal EUD system, but to cut across a variety of application domains based on our experience with the AgentSheets end-user simulation-authoring tool.We have pioneered a number of programming paradigms, experienced a slew of challenges originating in different user communities, and evolved EUD mechanisms over several years. In this chapter we present design guidelines that cut across this vast design space by conceptualizing the process of EUD as a learning experience. Fundamentally, we claim that every EUD system should attempt to keep the learning challenges in proportion to the skills end-users have. By adopting this perspective, EUD can actively scaffold a process during which end-users pick up new EUD tools and gradually learn about new functionality. We structure these design guidelines in accordance to their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic nature of support offered to end-users. Key words. agents, end-user programming, graphical rewrite rules, programming by example, visual programming.