Fostering the Adoption of Pervasive Displays in Public Spaces using Tangible End-User Programming

Nowadays we are continuously surrounded by new digital systems featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gesture, tangible, or voice interaction. The enriched and natural experience provided by this new paradigm - known as Natural User Interface - has promoted its adoption in many ubiquitous contexts due to its effectiveness in dealing with a wide audience of mostly inexperienced users; Pervasive Displays, namely variously-sized displays ecosystems supporting simultaneous interactions with public screens naturally use those new paradigms. Nonetheless, if we want these systems to stay out in public spaces for long periods of time, they must provide users with an easy way of being adapted to their heterogeneous usage contexts. In this paper, we propose an End-User Programming approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; we also carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.