Extending a Reactive Expression Language with Data Update Actions for End-User Application Authoring

Extending a Reactive Expression Language with Data Update Actions for End-User Application Authoring
Lea Verou, Tarfah Alrashed, David Karger

UIST '18: ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium
Session: Authoring, Reading and Writing

Abstract
Mavo is a small extension to the HTML language that empowers non-programmers to create simple web applications. Authors can mark up any normal HTML document with attributes that specify data elements that Mavo makes editable and persists. But while applications authored with Mavo allow users to edit individual data items, they do not offer any programmatic data actions that can act in customizable ways on large collections of data simultaneously or that modify data according to a computation. We explore an extension to the Mavo language that enables non-programmers to author these richer data update actions. We show that it lets authors create a more powerful set of applications than they could previously, while adding little additional complexity to the authoring process. Through user evaluations, we assess how closely our data update syntax matches how novice authors would instinctively express such actions, and how well they are able to use the syntax we provided.