Advancing End User Development Through Metadesign - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 144

practice and allows experts in a domain to personalize and evolve their own software environments.
We illustrate the Software Shaping Workshop methodology and describe its application to a project in
the medical domain. The work proposes a new perspective on system personalization, distinguishing
between customization and tailoring of software environments. The software environments are customized
by the design team to the work context, culture, experience, and skills of the user communities; they are
also tailorable by end users at runtime in order to adapt them to the specific work situation and users'
preferences and habits. The aim is to provide the physicians with software environments that are easy
to use and adequate for their tasks, capable to improve their work practice and determine an increase
in their productivity and performance.

introduCtion

These new uses of the system make the working
environment and organization evolve, and force
the designers to adapt the system to the evolved
user, organization, and environment (Bourguin,
Derycke, & Tarby, 2001). Moreover current tech-
niques for software specification and design, such
as UML, are very useful for software engineers,
but they are often alien to users' experience, lan-
guage, and background. A communication gap
arises between application designers and users,
which leads to design of software applications that
are not usable (Folmer et al., 2005). To overcome
these problems, software development life cycles
that foresee participatory design (Schuler & Na-
mioka, 1993) and open-ended design (Hartson &
Hix, 1993) are invoked. The diversity of end users
also calls for general, adaptive systems (Folmer
et al., 2005). The temptation is to develop very
general systems, thus falling in the Turing Tar
Pit, in which “ everything is possible but nothing
of interest is easy ” (Perlis, 1982, p. 10).
Actually, what software engineers should de-
sign are systems that can be used by end users in
a dependable and easy way. Hence, the opposite
temptation arises of creating specialized tools,
focused on the activity of a well specified user,
or a well specified and restricted community of
users tied by similar practices or similar interests,
working in a restricted context. Fischer (2006)
warns about the perils of this tendency: beware
of the inverse Turing Tar Pit, in which overspe-
cialized tools permit only trivial and isolated

The increasing diffusion of the World Wide Web
as the platform for a wide variety of applications
creates many expectations about the possibilities
offered by these interactive tools, but also raises
many challenges about their effective design. In
this chapter, we focus on Web applications that
support professional people in their work prac-
tice. Such professional people are a particular
class of end users; that is, they are not expert
in computer science, nor willing to be (Cypher,
1993), but they are forced, by the evolution of
the organizations in which they work and by
the progress of information technology, to use
computers and, increasingly often, to perform
programming activities (Folmer, van Welie, &
Bosch, 2005). In this chapter, by “end users,” we
denote these professionals and not end users in
a wider meaning.
Nowadays, end users evolve from passive
consumers of computer tools to a more active role
of information and software artifacts producers
(Fischer, 2002). This is also highlighted by the
Shneiderman's (2002) claim: “the old computing
was about what computers could do; the new
computing is about what users can do” (p. 2).
The interaction dimension creates new chal-
lenges for system specification, design, and imple-
mentation. It is well known that “using the system
changes the users, and as they change they will use
the system in new ways” (Nielsen, 1993, p. 78).