Web mashup makers for casual users: a user experiment

Abstract

Web mashups are become increasingly popular. A mashup is a Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated form. Several mashup creation tools, so-called mashup makers, exist and many of them are advertised as easy to use tools for casual 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 a usability study and user experiment on Web mashup makers for casual users. For this study, we have selected a representative set of mashup makers for casual users, and defined a number of evaluation criteria based on the cognitive dimensions of notations framework and the ISO 9241 part 11 Usability definition. Next, a user experiment was performed. The results of …