Communicability evaluation in systems created by designer-users

The number of people who strive to build their own systems grows every day, and for this type of activity we use the expression End-User Development (EUD). Communicability defines whether a system can make the user understands what the designer wanted to communicate when building a system. In this work, we evaluated the communicability in systems built by end users. For this evaluation, we used two methods: the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) and the Communicability Evaluation Method (CEM). Through these methods, we evaluated systems built by volunteers in a tool called SideTalk, which helps people with little or no programming knowledge to create conversations. We also evaluated the visualization of these conversations by other volunteers. We found a series of breakdowns in communication, either from the conversations or from the system itself. The main contribution of this paper is to present an innovative research in the area EUD which uses two methods of semiotics engineering, SIM and CEM, to evaluate the communicability of non-professional systems.