An End-User Development approach for Mobile Web Augmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework and tools enabling end users to add mobile-specific features to existing Web sites, enhancing mobile web experiences without requiring developer intervention.

Contribution

It presents a novel end-user development framework for mobile web augmentation, allowing non-programmers to customize Web sites with mobile features.

Findings

Successful validation with end users demonstrating practical usability.

Enhanced mobile Web functionality achieved through user-augmented features.

Framework supports diverse mobile feature integration without developer coding.

Abstract

The trend towards mobile devices usage has put more than ever the Web as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kind of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with 'native' mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These native applications might offer further (e.g. location-based) functionalities to their users in comparison with their corresponding Web sites, because they were developed with mobile features in mind. However, most Web applications have not this native mobile counterpart and users access them using browsers in the mobile device. Users might eventually want to add mobile features on these Web sites even though those features were not supported originally. In this paper we present a novel approach to allow end users to augment their preferred Web sites with mobile features. This end-user approach is supported by a framework for mobile Web augmentation that we describe in the paper. We also present a set of supporting tools and a validation experiment with end users.