The growth of connected, or so called smart home appliances, leads to the search for interaction methods for IoT devices including various forms of smartphone app solutions. Previous research has investigated how complex systems, with multiple options and configurations, can be set up through end-user programming and how app widgets can be an interactive solution. This approach has been adopted by few providers, however, there is little feedback from users on their experiences, in particular on the ease of configuration and customization of app widgets, the ease of use and expectations. To address these questions, I developed a novel app widget as a complement to an existing IoT smartphone app, along with three evaluations: one in-volving 8 experts including designers, developers and product managers; followed by a test session with 10 end users; and finally a field trial in which 3 users lived with the ability to use the widget for two weeks. Feedback and insights about how app widgets affected the user experience were gathered during the process confirming that widgets is a promising solution for controlling smart devices and, depending on the scenario and type of users, there are considerations that could limit or enhance their functionality. / Framväxten av sammankopplade hushållsapparater, eller så kallade ”smart home appliances”,aktualiserar sökandet efter interaktionsmetoder för IoT-produkter, t.ex. smartphone-appar. Tidigare forskning har undersökt hur komplexa system, med flera alternativ och konfigurationer, kan anpassas genom ”end-user-programmering”, och hur app-widgetar kan möjliggöra interaktiva lösningar. Ett fåtal leverantörer har annamat dessa tillvägagångssätt, men det saknas fortfarandefeedback fån användare, särskilt gällande konfigurering och specialanpassning av app-widgetar, lättanvändhet, och förväntningar. För att ta itu med dessa frågor utvecklade jag en ny app-widget som komplement till en etablerad IoT-app för smartphones, samt tre utvärderingar: en med åtta experter, inklusive designers, produktutvecklare, och produktchefer; följt av ett test med tio slutanvändare; och slutligen ett fältförsök där tre anvädare kunda använda app-widgeten i hemmet under två veckor. Under processen samlades feedback och insikter om app-widgetars inverkan på användarupplevelsen, vilka bekräftade att app-widgetar är en lovande metod för att kontrollera ”smart home appliances” och att det, beroende på scenario och användartyp, finns säskilda punkter som kan begränsa eller förhöja deras användbarhet. Framväxten av samman-kopplade hushållsapparater, eller så kallade ”smart home appliances”, aktualiserar sökandet efterinteraktionsmetoder för IoT-produkter, t.ex. smartphone-appar. Tidigare forskning har undersökt hur komplexa system, med flera alternativ och konfigurationer, kan anpassas genom ”end-user-programmering”, och hur app-widgetar kan möjliggöra interaktiva lösningar. Ett fåtal leverantörer har annamat dessa tillvägagångssätt, men det saknas fortfarande feedback från användare, särskilt gällande konfigurering och specialanpassning av app-widgetar, lättanvändhet, och förväntningar. För att ta itu med dessa frågor utvecklade jag en ny app-widget som komplement till en etablerad IoT-app för smartphones, samt tre utvärderingar: en med åtta experter, inklusive designers ,produktutvecklare, och produktchefer; följt av ett test med tio slutanvändare; och slutligen ett fältförsök där tre anvädare kunde använda app-widgeten i hemmet under två veckor. Under processen samlades feedback och insikter om app-widgetars inverkan på användarupplevelsen, vilka bekräftade att app-widgetar är en lovande metod för att kontrollera ”smart home appliances” och att det, beroende på scenario och användartyp, finns säskilda punkter som kan begränsa eller förhöja deras användbarhet.

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Tidigare studier har visat att träning av slutanvändare av affärssystem är viktigt. Samtidigt finns det faktorer som gör det viktigt för organisationer att ha en strategi för hur de kontinuerligt ska träna sina slutanvändare. Vår studie syftar därför till att tillhandahålla förslag för att organisationer bättre ska kunna hantera sin kontinuerliga träning av slutanvändare.Semistrukturerade intervjuer har gjorts med representanter från tre stora företag och tre affärssystemskonsulter i Skåneregionen. Studiens resultat visar att träning av slutanvändare överlag inte görs kontinuerligt i organisationer, detta trots att både företag och konsulter ser nyttan med det. Vidare har det även visat sig att det rådande träningskonceptet är att träna nyckelanvändare för att dessa sedan ska träna slutanvändare. Vi kritiserar detta träningskoncept, då nyckelanvändare oftast inte ges tillräckligt med tid till nyckelanvändaruppgifter från sin linjebefattning. Nyckelanvändare kan också sakna de individuella egenskaper som behövs för att träna slutanvändare i affärssystemet på ett lämpligt sätt. Vidare menar vi att organisationer behöver förbättra rådande tillvägagångsätt för att träna sina slutanvändare efter det att affärssystemet är implementerat.För att förbättra rådande tillvägagångssätt presenterar vi avslutningsvis nio förslag som syftar till att organisationer bättre ska kunna träna sina slutanvändare kontinuerligt. / Previous studies have shown that training of end users in the Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is crucial. Thus, factors point towards the importance of a continuous training strategy for the end users, inside organizations. Accordingly, the purpose of this study aims to provide suggestions for organizations to better manage their continuous training for end users.Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives from three large enterprises and three ERP consultants in the region of Skåne, Sweden. The study results show that the training of end users is not generally made continuously in organizations. This despite the fact that both companies and consultants see the benefit of it. Instead, we found that the current method of training is to train key users, who then train end users. We criticize this concept of training key users as they are often not given enough time from their line manager to do their key user tasks. These individuals may also lack the proper characteristics needed to successfully train end users in the ERP system. Furthermore, we argue that organizations need to find ways to improve current approaches to train end users after the ERP system is implemented.As a result of our findings we outline nine suggestions aimed for organizations to improve their current methods of training end users continuously.

The main goal of this research is to facilitate end-user and expert developer collaboration in the creation of a web application. This research created a reverse engineering toolset and integrated it with Click (Component-based Lightweight Internet-application Construction Kit), an end-user web development tool. The toolset generates artifacts to facilitate collaboration between end-users and expert web developers when the end-users need to go beyond the limited capabilities of Click. By supporting smooth transition of workflow to expert web developers, we can help them in implementing advanced functionality in end-user developed web applications. The four artifacts generated include a sitemap, text documentation, a task model, and a canonical representation of the user interface. The sitemap is automatically generated to support the workflow of web developers. The text documentation of a web application is generated to document data representation and business logic. A task model, expressed using ConcurTaskTrees notation, covers the whole interaction specified by the end-user. A presentation and dialog model, represented in User Interface Markup Language (UIML), describe the user interface in a declarative language. The task model and UIML representation are created to support development of multi-platform user interfaces from an end-user web application. A formative evaluation of the usability of these models and representations with experienced web developers revealed that these representations were useful and easy to understand. / Master of Science

The advent of extreme-scale computing systems, e.g., Petaflop supercomputers, High Performance Computing (HPC) cyber-infrastructure, Enterprise databases, and experimental facilities such as large-scale particle colliders, are pushing the envelope on dataset sizes.  Supercomputing centers routinely generate and consume ever increasing amounts of data while executing high-throughput computing jobs. These are often result-datasets or checkpoint snapshots from long-running simulations, but can also be input data from experimental facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). These growing datasets are often processed by a geographically dispersed user base across multiple different HPC installations.  Moreover, end-user workflows are also increasingly distributed in nature with massive input, output, and even intermediate data often being transported to and from several HPC resources or end-users for further processing or visualization. The growing data demands of applications coupled with the distributed nature of HPC workflows, have the potential to place significant strain on both the storage and network resources at HPC centers. Despite this potential impact, rather than stringently managing HPC center resources, a common practice is to leave application-associated data management to the end-user, as the user is intimately aware of the application's workflow and data needs. This means end-users must frequently interact with the local storage in HPC centers, the scratch space, which is used for job input, output, and intermediate data. Scratch is built using a parallel file system that supports very high aggregate I/O throughput, e.g., Lustre, PVFS, and GPFS. To ensure efficient I/O and faster job turnaround, use of scratch by applications is encouraged.  Consequently, job input and output data are required to be moved in and out of the scratch space by end-users before and after the job runs, respectively. In practice, end-users arbitrarily stage and offload data as and when they deem fit, without any consideration to the center's performance, often leaving data on the scratch long after it is needed. HPC centers resort to "purge" mechanisms that sweep the scratch space to remove files found to be no longer in use, based on not having been accessed in a preselected time threshold called the purge window that commonly ranges from a few days to a week. This ad-hoc data management ignores the interactions between different users' data storage and transmission demands, and their impact on center serviceability leading to suboptimal use of precious center resources. To address the issues of exponentially increasing data sizes and ad-hoc data management, we present a fresh perspective to scratch storage management by fundamentally rethinking the manner in which scratch space is employed. Our approach is twofold. First, we re-design the scratch system as a "cache" and build "retention", "population", and "eviction"  policies that are tightly integrated from the start, rather than being add-on tools. Second, we aim to provide and integrate the necessary end-user data delivery services, i.e. timely offloading (eviction) and just-in-time staging (population), so that the center's scratch space usage can be optimized through coordinated data movement. Together, these two combined approaches create our Integrated End-User Data Service, wherein data transfer and placement on the scratch space are scheduled with job execution. This strategy allows us to couple job scheduling with cache management, thereby bridging the gap between system software tools and scratch storage management. It enables the retention of only the relevant data for the duration it is needed. Redesigning the scratch as a cache captures the current HPC usage pattern more accurately, and better equips the scratch storage system to serve the growing datasets of workloads. This is a fundamental paradigm shift in the way scratch space has been managed in HPC centers, and outweighs providing simple purge tools to serve a caching workload. / Ph. D.

LibX is a browser extension that provides direct access to library resources. LibX enables users to add additional features to a webpage, such as placing a tutorial video on a digital library homepage. LibX achieves this ability of enhancing web pages through library applications, called LibApps. A LibApp examines a webpage, extracts and processes information of the page, and modifies the web content. It is possible to build an unlimited number of LibApps and enhance web pages in numerous ways. The developers of LibX team cannot build all possible LibApps by themselves. Hence, we decided to create an environment that allows users to create and share LibApps, thereby creating an eco-system of library applications. We developed the LibApp Builder, a cloud-based end-user programming tool that assists users in creating customized library applications with minimal effort. We designed an easy-to-understand meta-design language model with modularized, reusable components. The LibApp language model is designed to hide the complex programming details from the target audiences who are mostly non-technical users, primarily librarians. The LibApp Builder is a web-based editor that allows users to build and test LibApps in an executable environment. A built-in publishing mechanism allows users to group LibApps into packages and publish them in AtomPub format. Any user can directly reuse or adapt published components as required. Two error checking mechanisms have been built into the LibApp Builder viz., type checking and semantic checking to enhance user experience and reduce debugging effort. Additionally, the web interface displays help tooltips to guide users through the process of building a LibApp. We adhered to good software engineering practices such as the agile development model and the model-view-controller design paradigm. The LibApp Builder is built with the ZK AJAX framework and provides a rich interactive user interface. The LibApp Builder is integrated with an optimized full-text, fuzzy search engine and facilitates faceted search by exploiting the BaseX XML database system and XPath/XQuery processor. Users can locate and reuse existing language components through the search interface. To summarize, the LibApp Builder is a community platform for librarians to create, adapt and share LibApps. / Master of Science

[pt] O envolvimento de usuários no desenvolvimento de sistemas (End User Development) tem atraído significativa atenção nos últimos 10 anos devido à motivação de eles ajustarem as aplicações de acordo com seus desejos e necessidades. A Web 2.0 tem tornado possível o desenvolvimento de uma nova cultura de participação, através das redes sociais, onde usuários compartilham conhecimentos, experiências e habilidades. Esta pesquisa é uma contribuição para estimular uma cultura de participação de usuários finais em processos de desenvolvimento de software. Um contexto social onde essa participação ganha relevância é o de sistemas de grupo, onde as mudanças desejadas por uns tipicamente afetam outros usuários de formas nem sempre desejadas por eles. Nossa contribuição central é um modelo, fundamentado na Engenharia Semiótica, para descrever e negociar evolução de sistemas. Suas principais características são: (i) estrutura a comunicação entre os participantes da negociação e (ii) combina três sistemas de representação (linguagem de interface, linguagem natural utilizada em anotações, e linguagem de scripts de interações em páginas Web). Essas linguagens são combinadas para formar uma linguagem de especificação mista a ser utilizada por usuários finais. Implementamos a característica (ii) através da ferramenta primoTiWIM (This is What I Mean). Priorizamos a implementação e avaliação desta parte do modelo, porque a expressão através desta combinação de linguagens influencia a qualidade da comunicação de todo o processo que desejamos apoiar. Realizamos estudos empíricos observando a primeira reação e impressão de usuários diante da primoTiWIM. Os resultados permitem concluir que o modelo proposto tem potencial para promover uma cultura de participação no contexto da co-autoria entre usuário e desenvolvedores de software. / [en] The involvement of users in system development (End user development) has attracted significant attention in the last ten years, given that users can adjust the applications according to their desires and needs. TheWeb 2.0 has now made possible the development of a new culture of user participation through social networks, where users share knowledge, experience and abilities. The contribution of this research is to provide knowledge and tools to foster a culture of participation among end users in the process of software development. One of the social contexts where such participation is particularly important is that of group systems, where changes desired by some typically affect other users in ways that may not always be desirable for all. Our main contribution is a model founded in Semiotic Engineering to support describing and negotiating system evolution in group discussions. Its main features are: (i) it provides a structure for the communication between people involved in the negotiation, and (ii) it combines three representational systems (interface language, natural language used in annotations, and a script language for interaction in Web pages). These languages are combined into a hybrid specification language for end users. We implemented feature (ii) through the tool primoTiWIM (This is What I Mean). We focused on the implementation and evaluation of feature (ii), since expression through this combined language affects the communication quality of the whole process that we wish to support. In order to evaluate our proposal we carried out empirical studies in which we sought to observe the first reactions and impressions of users in face of the primoTiWIM Tool. We concluded that the proposed model has the potential to promote a culture of participation in the context of the co-authorship between user-eveloper and software developers.

Increasingly abundant access to data and cheaper display technology costs are creating an exciting opportunity to create new information awareness tools that can present information calmly through peripheral and ambient interfaces. These tools offer the potential to help people better manage their attention and to avoid information overload. Different people, however, have distinct information needs, and customizing these systems is often difficult. Existing interfaces typically provide too coarse or too fine a granularity of customization, resulting in tools that are too rigid or too difficult to configure. We present an extensively customizable information awareness system, The Buzz, that supports end users, tinkerers, and developers at using, modifying, creating, and sharing powerful and flexible customizations. These customizations are powerful in the sense that the user can control abstract behaviors of the system, and flexible in the sense that the complexity of the customization can vary with the power needed to express it. We further chart the broader information awareness customization space through the lens of existing customizable information tools. Through this analysis, we show that this system provides more extensive customization capabilities than other customizable awareness applications, without requiring significant programming.

Business information systems (BIS) comprise technological (e.g. programs), informational (e.g. content) and social artifacts (e.g. collaboration structures). Typically, such systems are constantly and collectively developed (co-developed) further by a variety of individuals within the organization. By recognizing these varying types of actors (concerning their goals, technical expertise and language means) and their predominantly developed artifact type, one can distinguish two types of subsystems: technical subsystems wherein the development of the system behavior is conducted by software developers; and business subsystems dominated by end-users developing informational artifacts. So far, co-development structures within and between these subsystems are not well understood, especially the aspect that - potentially driven by appropriate measures such as the provision of domain-specific languages - co-development might shift between these subsystems. This paper presents an approach for characterizing the co-development of real-world BIS with respect to direct participation from different kinds of contributors. This multilayered approach allows us to analyze the co-development with programming languages, domain-specific languages and end-user tools. The approach is suited to assess the direct participation of individuals from different subsystems in the development of evolving BIS. We focus on the intersection of these subsystems, present appropriate metrics and a multilayered analysis scheme. Contributions to artifacts are analyzed using social network analysis to detect structural properties of continuous co-development. The application to Learn@WU, a real-world BIS, demonstrates how end-user enabling technologies have shifted the co-development effort of the system from a small group of developers to a several orders of magnitude larger group of contributors. We observed an increase of direct participation over time on both informational and executable artifacts, while the number of technical experts was more or less constant. Our approach may act as a trigger for the application and further development of rigorous instruments for assessing co-development of BIS. (authors' abstract)

Thesis (M. Tech. Office Management and Technology) --Vaal University of Technology / The world of digital interactivity, of computers, of cyberspace and the "e-revolution', is making computer literacy more indispensable than ever. There is an increasing demand for ICT skills worldwide- South Africa is not alone in identifying shortages. The information and communication technology in South Africa is exacerbated by emigration on the one hand and the previously disadvantaged learners on the other hand. With an education system that is stretched, higher education has not kept pace with information and communication technology training in South Africa, therefore learners display a shortcoming of basic computer skills. The purpose of this study is to emphasise the importance of implementing computer literacy training throughout the entire learning programme of learners at higher education institutions. Learners randomly selected from the Faculty of Management Sciences, Vaal University of Technology, indicated their computer literacy via questionnaires and levels of experience. It is clear that the abilities of the learners are not sufficient to ensure that they are computer literate or that they will be effective users in the workplace. This study results in a powerful argument in support of the extension of continued growth in computer usage in the workplace.