Advancing End User Development Through Metadesign - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 153

by customizing the application workshops using
their system workshops.
In this organization, the personalization activi-
ties of application workshops can be performed by
the design team or by the end users themselves.
Thus, we classify personalization activities into
customization and tailoring. Customization is
the activity performed by the design team which
generates application workshops for a specific
community of users by exploiting users' notations,
dialects, principles, and standard rules. Tailoring
is the activity performed by end users to adapt an
application workshop to the current activity and
context of work. The idea is to permit tailoring of
systems already specific and suitable to the needs
of a specific community of users, thus allowing
users a further step of individual personalization.
We call this activity tailoring toward the individual
(or individual tailoring ), which is performed by
the users through small incremental steps.
Different types of individual tailoring can be
devised: tailoring for individual work , concern-
ing the activities that the specialist can perform
to adapt her or his environment during her or his
own work; and tailoring for cooperative work , in-
cluding those activities that the specialist performs
to prepare the information that will be provided
to another specialist to whom a consultation is
requested.

medical examinations giving their own contribu-
tion according to their “expertise”. However, the
increasing number of diagnostic tools and medical
specializations as well as the increasing number
of patients do not permit the team of specialists
to meet as frequently as needed to analyze the
clinical cases especially if they do not work in the
same building or moreover they work in different
towns or states.
The information technology has today the po-
tential of overcoming this difficulty by providing
software environments that allow a synchronous
and/or asynchronous collaboration “at a distance”.
Thus, the specialists do not need to meet at the
same moment for analyzing the clinical cases on
which they collaborate. Software environments
will give the possibility to each specialist of ana-
lyzing the medical cases of different patients and
of formulating her or his own diagnosis, taking
into account the opinions of the other colleagues
without the need of a synchronous consultation.
There are already tools for supporting the
physicians to formulate the medical diagnosis, for
example, telemedicine, videoconference, and so
forth. They are very sophisticated and often they
need large system resources. Moreover, physi-
cians complain that although these tools are very
expensive, they are designed more for computer
experts than for physicians. In the experience with
physicians collaborating with us, these tools pres-
ent personalization features very difficult to be
learned and used by them. Our proposal of SSWs
aims at providing the physicians with software
tools that are first of all easy and adequate for the
physicians' current tasks. This would determine
an increase in end-user productivity and per-
formance, with the achievement of competitive
advantage for the organization they work in, by
permitting consultations among physicians with-
out constraints of time and place.
In the case study with radiologists and pneu-
mologists (Costabile et al., 2006a), we adopted the
SSW approach to provide physicians with software
tools that are both usable and tailorable to their

an application in the medical
domain

In this section, we describe a project in the medi-
cal domain, to which we are currently applying
the SSW methodology. The improvement of the
quality of the medical diagnosis is the main goal
of each physician. Thanks to the evolution of
research and technology in the medical domain,
each specialist may have the aid of medical ex-
aminations of different types, that is, laboratory
examinations, X-rays, MRI (Magnetic Resonance
Imaging), and so forth. A team of physicians
with different specializations should analyze the