An End User Development Approach for Mobile Web Augmentation

The trend towards mobile devices usage has made it possible for theWeb to be conceived not only as an information space but also as a ubiquitous platformwhere users performall kinds of tasks. In some cases, users access theWeb with nativemobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as, L...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Bosetti, Gabriela, Firmenich, Sergio, Gordillo, Silvia Ethel, Rossi, Gustavo Héctor, Winckler, Marco
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2017
Country:Argentina
Institution:Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
Repository:CIC Digital (CICBA)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.cic.gba.gob.ar:11746/7077
Online Access:https://digital.cic.gba.gob.ar/handle/11746/7077
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Ciencias de la Computación e Información
Web sites
native mobile applications
mobile Web browser
Description
Summary:The trend towards mobile devices usage has made it possible for theWeb to be conceived not only as an information space but also as a ubiquitous platformwhere users performall kinds of tasks. In some cases, users access theWeb with nativemobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These native applications might offer further (e.g., location-based) functionalities to their users in comparison with their correspondingWeb sites because they were developed with mobile features in mind. However, many Web applications have no native counterpart and users access them using a mobileWeb browser. Although the access to context information is not a complex issue nowadays, not all Web applications adapt themselves according to it or diversely improve the user experience by listening to a wide range of sensors. At some point, users might want to add mobile features to these Web sites, even if those features were not originally supported. In this paper, we present a novel approach to allow end users to augment their preferred Web sites with mobile features. We support our claims by presenting a framework for mobileWeb augmentation, an authoring tool, and an evaluation with 21 end users.