Revealing the Copy and Paste Habits of End Users

Transferring data across applications is a common end user task, and copying and pasting via the clipboard lets users do so relatively easily. Using the clipboard, however, can also introduce inefficiencies and errors in user tasks. To help researchers and tool developers understand and address these problems, we studied how end users interact with the clipboard through cut, copy, and paste actions. This study was performed by logging clipboard interactions while end users performed everyday tasks. From the clipboard usage data, we have identified several usage patterns that describe how data is transferred within the desktop environment. Such patterns help us understand end user behavior and indicate areas in which clipboard support tools can be improved.

Helping End-Users “Engineer” Dependable Web Applications

End-user programmers are increasingly relying on web authoring environments to create web applications. Although often consisting primarily of web pages, such applications are increasingly going further, harnessing the content available on the web through “programs” that query other web applications for information to drive other tasks. Unfortunately, errors can be pervasive in web applications, impacting their dependability. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of end-user web application developers, performed with the aim of exposing prevalent classes of errors. The results suggest that end-users struggle the most with the identification and manipulation of variables when structuring requests to obtain data from other web sites. To address this problem, we present a family of techniques that help end user programmers perform this task, reducing possible sources of error. The techniques focus on simplification and characterization of the data that end-users must analyze while developing their web applications. We report the results of an empirical study in which these techniques are applied to several popular web sites. Our results reveal several potential benefits for end-users who wish to “engineer” dependable web applications.