An End-User Development approach for Mobile Web Augmentation
This addresses the need for mobile functionality on web sites without native apps, but it is incremental as it builds on existing web augmentation concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling end users to add mobile features to web sites that lack native mobile applications, presenting a novel approach and framework for mobile web augmentation, validated through an experiment with end users.
The trend towards mobile devices usage has put more than ever the Web as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kind of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with 'native' mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These native applications might offer further (e.g. location-based) functionalities to their users in comparison with their corresponding Web sites, because they were developed with mobile features in mind. However, most Web applications have not this native mobile counterpart and users access them using browsers in the mobile device. Users might eventually want to add mobile features on these Web sites even though those features were not supported originally. In this paper we present a novel approach to allow end users to augment their preferred Web sites with mobile features. This end-user approach is supported by a framework for mobile Web augmentation that we describe in the paper. We also present a set of supporting tools and a validation experiment with end users.