Flow Specification Patterns of End-User Programmers: Lessons Learnt from a Health Mobile Application Authoring Environment Design

Abstract : This paper discusses a set of interaction patterns encountered during the development of an authoring tool for mobile therapeutic applications. Unlike static paper artefacts, mobile applications can be enriched via the inclusion of complex behaviors. Typical examples include the definition of simple sequential interaction among all screens or the involvement of basic rules and triggers. As part of an ongoing project in which we are designing an authoring environment for mobile applications in clinical interventions, we studied how clinicians with no programming background were able to intertwine different screens from an application according to different rules. We were especially interested in comparing the approaches adopted using a low-fidelity prototype and using a high-fidelity version of the authoring tool. Results show that, despite a few technology induced strategies, users tend to mimic their actions using the paper based prototype in the corresponding hi-fi version.