Paper Reading #17: Mobia Modeler: Easing the Creation Process of Mobile Applications for Non-Technical Users

Commentary

See what I have to say about Joshua's and Shena's work.

References

Baltagas-Fernandez, F., Hussman, H., and Tafelmayer, M. (2010). Mobia modeler: easing the creation process of mobile applications for non-technical users. Proceeding of the Acm conference on intelligent user interfaces. Hong Kong: http://www.iuiconf.org/.

Article Summary

In this article, the researchers present a system comprised of an abstraction model and its respective interpreter, called the Mobia Modeler. The aim of the system is to allow users without technical experience with respect to mobile platform programming to create practical applications with the modelling system. A usage scenario presented by the researchers involved a doctor creating an application that would monitor a patient's vital signs and alert the doctor or emergency officials in the event of abnormal or dangerous observations. The system produces two subsets of the modeling language: a Platform Independent Model (PIM) and a Platform Specific Model (PSM). Users create applications by linking components together via the graphical user interface, and the system's processor then translates the graphical model to platform-specific code based on the relationships between the components that were defined by the user. Put another way, the user writes and application in PIM, and the processor translates it to PDM. Participants included individuals from different fields and from different technical backgrounds, i.e. those with programming experience and those without. Evaluation revealed that the programmers rated the system higher than the non-programmers.

Discussion

As the authors stated, this isn't the first time something like this has been tried. For example, National Instruments has the LabView platform, which admittedly provides much more functionality and control than the Mobia Modeler, and is targeted at a much more technical crowd. Additionally, the Java programming language comes to mind in reference to platform-independent and -specific code.

A basic code example in LabView. Image courtesy of San Diego State University

That being said, I think the authors did a fantastic job of bringing these concepts together in a way that is accessible to users of all technical backgrounds. Indeed, it makes the most practical sens (to me) to implement the system in this way. Non-technical users will quickly come to learn how to control interactions between objects graphically, and the platform-independent and -specific paradigm makes this application marketable across a wide share of current mobile devices. It comes as no surprise to me that the programmers felt more at ease using this system: they already think in terms of the system. With a little more practice, however, I believe that the non-technical users would be up to speed with their more technical counterparts in no time.