Assessing end-user programming for a graphics development environment

Abstract

Quartz Composer is a graphics development environment that uses a visual programming paradigm to enable its users to create a wide variety of animations. Although it is very powerful with a rich set of programming capabilities for its users, there remain barriers to its full use, especially by end-users. This paper presents a prototype end-user programming system that is designed to remove the barriers present in the native Quartz Composer environment. The system, called QEUP, is based on earlier work with cogito. It provides direct access to samples of Quartz Composer output without requiring any of the manual programming involved in Quartz Composer. In order to assess the impacts of QEUP, a user study was conducted with 15 participants. Preliminary results indicate that there may be benefit to using QEUP when first learning Quartz Composer, or when learning new capabilities within it. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.