Rule-Based Programming as Easy as a Child's Play. A User Study on Active Documents

In the last years, visual languages are becoming increasingly popular in the educational domain, but scholars are also beginning to explore the possibility to adopt them in other domains where their alleged user-friendliness and simplified interaction can be considered more than a simple embellishment of existing user interfaces. In this paper we present an experimental user study that we conducted to validate the hypothesis that adopting a visual language could help end-users of a document-based information system in defining their own document-related local rules to make their graphical interfaces active and proactive with respect to content, context and mediated interactions. The user study reported in this paper allows us to claim that our visual rule editor, which extends and customizes an existing framework recently developed at the MIT (OpenBlocks), is so easy to use that even untrained end-users can execute simple tasks of rule definition as proficiently as those that conversely received an ad-hoc and effective training. Although the conclusions of this study can not be generalized, this result stands as a preliminary contribution in demonstrating the importance of visual languages and editors to make rule-based programming "as easy as a child's play"