Design planning by end-user web developers

We report an exploratory research project that investigates the impacts of different forms of design planning on end users asked to develop a simple interactive web application. End users created their projects (a Ride Board application) using the CLICK end-user web development tool [J. Rode, User-centered design of end-user web development tool, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA, 2005]. Some participants were asked to create a conceptual map to plan their projects and others to write user interaction scenarios; a third group was asked to do whatever they found useful. We describe the planning that each group underwent, how they approached the web development task, and their reactions to the experience afterwards. The overall pattern of results suggests that while the participants who planned using scenarios felt they better understood the web development task, it was the group who created concept maps that explored and incorporated more of the novel programming features of the CLICK tool. We also discuss the role of gender in the CLICK development task, noting that women were less likely to explore the tool's novel features and perceived themselves as less successful in the task. We conclude with a discussion of design implications and future work.

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