Distributed Web browsing: supporting frequent uses and opportunistic requirements
This addresses the problem of limited user empowerment in managing distributed interactions for web users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing web augmentation and end-user development concepts.
The paper tackles the lack of distributed user interface (DUI) support in web applications by proposing a client-side platform that shifts distribution responsibility from applications to browsers, enabling end users to augment existing web apps for frequent and opportunistic DUI needs, with a prototype tool and case studies demonstrating its feasibility.
Nowadays, the development of Web applications supporting distributed user interfaces (DUI) is straightforward. However, it is still hard to find Web sites supporting this kind of user interaction. Although studies on this field have demonstrated that DUI would improve the user experience, users are not massively empowered to manage these kinds of interactions. In this setting, we propose to move the responsibility of distributing both the UI and user interaction, from the application (a Web application) to the client (the Web browser), giving also rise to inter-application interaction distribution. This paper presents a platform for client-side DUI, built on the foundations of Web augmentation and End User Development. The idea is to empower end users to apply an augmentation layer over existing Web applications, considering both frequent use and opportunistic DUI requirements. In this work, we present the architecture and a prototype tool supporting this approach and illustrate the incorporation of some DUI features through case studies.