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Tools that enable end-users to customize websites typically use a two-stage workflow: first, users extract data into a structured form; second, they use that extracted data to augment the original website in some way. This two-stage workflow poses a usability barrier because it requires users to make upfront decisions about what data to extract, rather than allowing them to incrementally extract data as they augment it. In this paper, we present a new, unified interaction model for web customization that encompasses both extraction and augmentation. The key idea is to provide users with a spreadsheet-like formula language that can be used for both data extraction and augmentation. We also provide a programming-by-demonstration (PBD) interface that allows users to create data extraction formulas by clicking on elements in the website. This model allows users to naturally and iteratively move between extraction and augmentation. To illustrate our unified interaction model, we have implemented a tool called Joker which is an extension of Wildcard, a prior web customization system. Through case studies, we show that Joker can be used to customize many real-world websites. We also present a formative user study with five participants, which showed that people with a wide range of technical backgrounds can use Joker to customize websites, and also revealed some interesting limitations of our approach.
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Towards End-user Web Scraping For Customization
Websites are malleable: users can run code in the browser to customize them. However, this malleability is typically only accessible to programmers with knowledge of HTML and Javascript. Previously, we developed a tool called Wildcard which empowers end-users to customize websites through a spreadsheet-like table interface without doing traditional programming. However, there is a limit to end-user agency with Wildcard, because programmers need to first create site-specific adapters mapping website data to the table interface. This means that end-users can only customize a website if a programmer has written an adapter for it, and cannot extend or repair existing adapters. In this paper, we extend Wildcard with a new system for enduser web scraping for customization. It enables end-users to create, extend and repair adapters, by performing concrete demonstrations of how the website user interface maps to a data table. We describe three design principles that guided our system’s development and are applicable to other end-user web scraping and customization systems: (a) users should be able to scrape data and use it in a single, unified environment, (b) users should be able to extend and repair the programs that scrape data via demonstration and (c) users should receive live feedback during their demonstrations. We have successfully used our system to create, extend and repair adapters by demonstration on a variety of websites and we provide example usage scenarios that showcase each of our design principles. Our ultimate goal is to empower end-users to customize websites in the course of their daily use in an intuitive and flexible way, and thus making the web more malleable for all of its users.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1801399
- PAR ID:
- 10272153
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Programming Experience Workshop (PX/21); Companion Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
