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The increasing volume of content and actions available on the Web, combined with the growing number of mature digital natives, anticipate a growing desire of controlling the Web experience. Akin to the Web2.0 movement, webies’ desires do not stop at content authoring but look for controlling how content is arranged in websites. By content, we mainl...
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... When a web service is delivered via a user's browser, the loaded web page exists in its entirety on the user's local device within the browser at the point of interaction-creating a seam that cannot be removed and where the service provider's power to influence the user's interaction is reduced. This opportunity is exploited by the mechanism of web augmentation (Díaz, 2012;Díaz et al., 2013;Díaz et al., 2014;Díaz and Arellano, 2015), in which a user's experience is modified using a browser extension or plugin to manipulate the loaded web page in order to remove, add or modify elements of the page before the user interacts with it. The most well-known examples are adblockers that remove unwanted banners, advertisements or popups from pages. ...
... This design template for augmenting Just Eat could be implemented within a browser extension and trialled with Just Eat users. Existing browser plug-ins such as Takeaway Hygiene Ratings UK (Hodgson, 2017) demonstrate that adding existing supplementary information such as hygiene rating using web augmentation (Díaz et al., 2013;Díaz et al., 2014;Díaz and Arellano, 2015) is technologically viable. Therefore, implementation of our designs using web augmentation could convert a commercial platform into an experimental environment to understand user behaviour in relation to different site cues and identify mechanisms to promote healthier purchases. ...
Online services have become increasingly centralized, drawing on notions of the ‘platform economy’ to focus on ecosystem value rather than user value. In parallel, there have been efforts by developers to augment these platforms, empowering platform users in the process. We explored a 12-month participatory-action project, focusing on redesigning portions of Just Eat, an online aggregator for takeaway food ordering, building upon theoretical perspectives from public health and Digital Civics. We document our experiences in identifying user behaviours and motivations across multiple design workshops, including the design of a web-augmentation–based template to disrupt platform provider behaviours, empower service users and increase individual agency. Through this case study, we identify opportunities and mechanisms for platform modification, linking augmentation to adversarial design with outcomes that have the potential to improve the well-being of platform users.
... When a website is viewed, the loaded web page then exists on the user's local device within the web browser at the point of interaction-creating a seam that cannot be removed and where the service provider's power to influence the user's interaction is reduced. This opportunity is exploited by the mechanism of web augmentation (Díaz, 2012;Díaz, Arellano and Azanza, 2013;Díaz et al., 2014;Díaz and Arellano, 2015), in which a user's experience is modified using a browser extension or plugin to manipulate the loaded web page in order to remove, add, or modify elements of the page before the user interacts with it. Well-known examples are adblockers that remove unwanted banners, advertisements, or pop-ups from pages. ...
... In all these communities, no matter which tool they support, there is a dependency between users with and without programming skills, since not all of them can implement the solutions they need and ask others for help. In this light, some research works proposed End-User Development (EUD) approaches to let users specify their own augmentation artifacts; these works are discussed in the related work section [21,22]. ...
Decision making in agriculture increasingly relies on software, for example to gather important information or to weight alternatives. Information systems innovation in agriculture is a challenging and very active area. Existing software products, frequently implemented as web applications, are found to lack functionality, for example to support collaboration. Augmenting the web is a widely adopted technique for enhancing existing applications with new features which are not available out-of-the-shelf. Design thinking has proven to be an effective tool to support innovation on many domains. Collaboration Engineering is an effective means to reuse design experience of collaboration strategies. This work presents an approach to involve end-users in enhancing exiting web software to produce incremental innovations. The approach relies on Design Thinking, Web Augmentation and Collaboration Engineering. The approach was successfully tried in a case study letting end-users add collaboration support to a system that did not provide it.
... If the requirement is simple enough, Peter could be able to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools such as Platypus [44] or WebMakeUp [13] for developing the artifact by its own without learning new programming languages. However, as we show later, it is hard to satisfy Peter's requirements with such tools since they do not even have the expressivity needed. ...
... Others authors have proposed end-user programming languages for Web Augmentation, although requiring some high technical skills [12]. The same authors have defined the WebMa-keUp [13] approach, comprising an end-user tool allowing users to perform several kinds of augmentations. Regardless of these very important contributions, we strongly believe that most of the popular Web Augmentation artifacts are not possible to be specified only using this kind of tools. ...
... These works have shown the power of augmentation techniques when applied to specific domains, designing specific tools and making easier the development of augmentation artifacts in the context of a particular domain. Also others works have shown that end users without programming skills are able to create their own augmentations [13], although reducing the expressivity and consequently supporting only a subset of potential adaptations, or DSL for Web Augmentation [12]. ...
Web Applications are accessed by millions of users with different needs, goals, concerns, or preferences. Several well-known Web Applications provide personalized features, e.g., they recommend specific content to users by contemplating individual characteristics or requirements. However, since most Web Application cannot consider all users’ requirements, many developers started to create their own mechanisms for adapting existing applications. One of the most popular techniques for third-party applications adaptation is Web Augmentation, which is based on the alteration of its original user interface, generally by using scripts running at the client side (e.g., the browser). In the context of Web Augmentation, two user roles have emerged: scripters who are those users able to create a new augmentation artifact, and end
users without programming skills, that just consume the artifacts that may satisfy totally or partially their needs. Scripters and end users generally do not know each other, and they have rarely a contact, beyond the fact that they use the same script repositories. When end users cannot get their needs covered with existing artifacts, they claim for new ones by specifying their requirements (called Web Augmentation requirements) using textual descriptions, which are usually hard to interpret by scripters. Web Augmentation requirements are a very particular kind of Web requirements for which there partially exist a solution implemented by the Web site owner, but still users need to change or augment that implementation with very specific purposes that they desire to be available in such site. In this paper, we propose an approach for defining and evolving Web Augmentation requirements using rich visual prototypes and textual descriptions that can be automatically mapped onto running software artifacts. We present a tool implemented to support this approach, and we show an evaluation of both the approach and the tool.
... This section illustrates WA at work using WebMakeup [23]. This tool supports the modification of the content, the presentation, and the behavior of Web pages. ...
This chapter presents Web Augmentation (WA) technologies as tools and techniques for end-user development. WA technologies differ from other web development technologies as they target at improving existing Web pages and not at creating new Web sites. These improvements can deeply alter the way users use and interact with Web sites. This chapter revisits the concept of WA and provides an overview of the main features that characterize WA technologies. This characterization is used to position and compare the various contributions that have been made in WA. To make things more concrete we provide an illustration of WA technology through a case study using a dedicated tool called WebMakeup. Despite all their advantages, WA technologies present some limitations that might result in challenges on the user side. These aspects are also presented and discussed, highlighting directions for future work in that domain.
... Locators are used in a broad range of scenarios, namely, Web testing [11], Web harvesting (a.k.a web data extraction) [7], Web annotation [16], Web automation [12] or Web augmentation [6]. Our focus is on Web augmentation, specifically, on browser extensions. ...
... The process iterates till either the XPath expression delivers a unique result or all ancestors have been considered. Regenerative locator algorithm is being fleshed out in WebMakeup, an editor for generating browser extensions[6]. ...
Web locators uniquely identify elements on the Web Content. They are heavily used in different scenarios, from Web harvesting to Web testing and browser extensions. Locators' Achilles heel is their fragility upon Website upgrades. This work tackles locator fragility in the context of browser extensions. We introduce regenerative locator, i.e. traditional structure-based locators which are supplemented with contingency data from the target node. The aim: keeping browser extensions up and running for as long as possible. Eight case studies are analysed by considering real Website upgrades taken from Wayback Machine. Figures indicate a 70% success in regenerating broken locators without interrupting extension functioning.
... This section illustrates WA at work using WebMakeup [23]. This tool supports the modification of the content, the presentation, and the behavior of Web pages. ...
... Thus, in front of requirements that are not satisfied, end-users might formulate their requests for new augmenters instead of addressing the Web site's owners to change the original Web site [15]. Moreover, some of the tools delivered by the community such as "modding interface" [1] [9] and WebMakeUp [7] explore the possibility of supporting the development of simple Web augmenters by end-users. Whilst these are still early attempts for supporting end-user programming over the Web, at least in terms of coordination of adaptation tasks to be performed over Web sites, are promising and should be considered in a longer run [14] [22]. ...
... From the academy, in more recent years many work have investigate the potential of using End-User Programming techniques for allowing users to customize their applications [7] [16]. Participation of the crowd of end-users is often presented as a suitable alternative for personalization, which often requires appropriate tool support [25] and methodological approach for personalization [11]. ...
The use of Web augmentation techniques has an impact on tasks of owners of Web sites, developers of scripts and end-users. Because the Web sites can be modified by external scripts, their owners might lose control about how Web site contents are delivered. To prevent this, they might be tempted to modify the structure of Web pages thus making harder to execute external scripts. However, communities of Web augmentation scripters are increasing since end-users still have needs not yet covered by Web sites. In this paper we analyze the trade-offs of the introduction of Web augmentation scripts. In order to mitigate some negative effects, such as the loss of control, we propose an approach based on negotiation and coordination between actors involved in the process. We present a set of tools to facilitate the integration of scripts and to foster their dissemination for the benefit of all actors involved.
Modding refers to the act of modifying hardware, software, or virtually anything else, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. The rationales for modding should be sought in the aspiration of users to contextualize to their own situation the artefact at hand. Websites are not exception. WebMakeup targets mod scenarios where web pages are turned into canvases users can tune to account for their situational, idiosyncratic, and potentially, short-lived needs. By clicking, users turn DOM nodes into widgets. Widgets can next be rearranged, deleted, updated or stored for later reuse in other pages. In addition, widgets can be involved in “blink” patterns where interactions with a widget might affect the related widgets. This empowers users to tune not only what but also when content is to show up in an AJAX-like way. WebMakeup is publicly available as a Chrome extension.
This paper presents a novel approach towards the opportunistic and lightweight distribution of existent Web User Interfaces. We describe an architecture that allows end-users to collect UI objects into a distributed UI-Component-oriented PIM, accessible from different user’s devices. Once in the PIM, the collected UI components are wrapped with different DUI-based behaviours that may be triggered by the user, as PIM’s objects plug-ins. We present an overview of the architecture; some default DUI-based behaviours are introduced and illustrated through examples. Besides, we show how the architecture supports the development of new DUI-based behaviours.
