SENSATION: An Authoring Tool to Support Event-State Paradigm in End-User Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces SENSATION, an authoring tool designed to help end-users define Trigger-Actions rules that integrate events and states, addressing the management difficulty of their distinction.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel authoring tool that explicitly supports managing the event-state distinction in Trigger-Actions rules for end-user development.

Findings

SENSATION improves user understanding of event-state distinctions.

The tool outperforms classical event-only paradigms in usability.

Evaluation shows increased accuracy in rule creation.

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and the evaluation of an authoring tool for End-User Development, which supports the definition of Trigger-Actions rules that combines events and states in the triggers. The possibility of using either states or events in triggers has already been discussed in the literature. However, it is recognized that the state/event distinction is difficult to manage for users. In this paper, we propose an authoring tool that provides explicit support for managing this distinction. We compare it with a state-of-the-art authoring tool that implements the classical event-event paradigm.