Toward usability evaluation criteria for web mashup makers for end-users

Abstract

Currently, more than two billions people access the web for various purposes. The majority are people without programming or modeling backgrounds. Part of these people also likes to create their own Web applications to meet their daily needs. Mashup Makers are tools to create such enduser’s Web applications. As such, Mashup Makers could become the dominant environment for end-user development of Web applications. Several Mashup creation tools, socalled Mashup makers, exist and many of them are advertised as easy to use tools for end-users. These tools target Web users without programming background and promise that creating a Web Mashup is just a matter of a few mouse clicks. However, no profound usability evaluations have been performed to justify those claims. In this paper, we report on an initial usability study on Web Mashup makers for end-users. For this study, we have selected a representative set of Web Mashup makers for end-users, and defined a number of evaluation criteria based on the cognitive dimensions of notations framework. The results of this study are presented in this paper. We also reflect on the methodology used.