End User Requirements for the Composable Web

With the enormous auspices and resources EU research projects are receiving to enable the diffusion of lightweight service composition approaches among end users, it is imperative for these projects to understand and establish the correct user requirements that lead to development of easy to use and effective software platforms. To this end, a user-centric study which includes 15 participants is carried out to unravel users’ perception of software services and service composition, their working ways, and identify users’ expectations and usability problems of a future service composition tool. Several examples and prototypes are used to steer this elicitation study, among which is a simple composition tool designed to support non-programmers to create interactive service-based applications in a lightweight and visual manner. Although a high user acceptance emerged in regard to “developing service-based applications by users”, there is evidence of a fundamental issue concerning conceptual understanding of service composition (i.e. end users do not think about connecting services). This paper discusses various conceptual and usability problems of service composition and proposes recommendations to resolve them.