Introduction to the EUSES Web Macro Scenario Corpus

1. Introduction to theEUSES Web Macro Scenario Corpus Allen Cypher, Sebastian Elbaum,Andhy Koesnandar, Brad Myers, Christopher Scaffidi

2. Talk outline • What we are doing and why • What scenarios are like • What we have found so far • What we hope you will contribute • Lots of time for discussion What I am going to talk about

3. What is a “web macro scenario corpus”? • We identified real-world repetitive tasks that end users perform in a browser. • We imagined automating these in a web macro tool: • Demonstrate an example of the task to a recorder • The tool creates a macro to represent the task steps • Replay the macro as needed later • We collected 10 such tasks, described them as scenarios, and analyzed what kinds of features a tool would need to provide in order to automate these tasks. What we are doing, and why

4. What are the benefits of the corpus? • Illustrates the wide range of potential applications for web macros • Enables researchers to test their tools with tasks from the real world (“benchmark”) • Provides a seed that can grow into a larger corpus as other researchers contribute additional scenarios These require tasks that EUs would benefitfrom automating. What we are doing, and why

5. Where did we get scenarios from? • Contextual inquiry – 3 scenarios • E.g.: looking up staff in online directory • Our own experiences – 2 scenarios • E.g.: tracking packages shipped via DHL • Co-workers – 2 scenarios • E.g.: ordering products on a corporate intranet shop • Online sources – 3 scenarios • E.g.: downloading stock statistics/data What scenarios are like

6. What is in a scenario? What scenarios are like

7. Walk through an example scenario What scenarios are like

8. What requirements for web macro tools have we uncovered? Transforming data Reformat to equivalent value Extraction of values’ parts Combination of values Executing control structures Looping operations Conditional operations Recovering from failure Partial restarts Exception handlers Supporting macro maintenance User-understandable representation Editable macros Features for debugging Maintenance at runtime Triggering macros On-demand execution Scheduled execution Event-based triggers Subroutines Finding objects on web pages Adapting to changing page layout Adapting to changing form fields Adapting to changing URLs Reading/writing data Text snippets Tabular information Web form widgets HTML generation Other browser APIs Spreadsheets and other files Parameters containing user input What we have found so far

9. How can you contribute? • We are currently wrapping up a technical report with version 1.0 of the scenario corpus (by end of Nov.?) • You can give us suggestions on the technical report. • We will wikify the corpus (by end of Dec.?) • You can post new scenarios & tool requirements. • We will turn sections of the technical report into a VL/HCC paper (by Mar. 2007) • You can suggest things you’d like to see in the paper. What we hope you will contribute