What is it about?

Psychology researchers and clinicians are interested in tracking people's emotions or symptoms as they go about their daily lives. Smartphone apps that present surveys for their users to complete at different times of the day lets users describe these emotions and symptoms that they are feeling at that exact time. In this paper we present a software application that allows people to create these smartphone apps without any programming skills, and through interviews of target users and real-world use cases of our application, we find out what users really want and need from this kind of software.

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Why is it important?

We show that psychology researchers are enthusiastic about customising smartphone apps for research participants and are able to do so. This is important as it allows these researchers to tailor the type and frequency of participant data collected without the need to employ a professional programmer. The feedback we received allows us to improve upon customisation tools, allowing for more useful data collection while still not requiring the researcher to know any programming.

Perspectives

This article is the summary findings of my PhD project 'Jeeves' - the software previously mentioned that allows researchers to create smartphone apps for participant data collection without doing any programming. It feels great to finally have it out there in a more digestible format than an 80000 word thesis! I hope that those of you who read this article might consider how to apply real-time data collection or 'experience sampling' to their own research. I also hope it will introduce many to the field of 'end-user development', where we believe that the users of software should have the opportunity to decide what it does!

Daniel Rough
University of Dundee

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This page is a summary of: End-User Development of Experience Sampling Smartphone Apps -Recommendations and Requirements, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, June 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3397307.
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