EUDoptimizer: Assisting End Users in Composing IF-THEN Rules Through Optimization

Nowadays, several interfaces for End-User Development (EUD) empower end users to jointly program the behavior of their smart devices and online services, typically through trigger-action rules. Despite their popularity, such interfaces often expose too much functionality, and force user to search among a large number of supported technologies disposed in confused grid menus. This paper contributes to the EUD with the aim of interactively assisting end users in composing IF-THEN rules with an optimizer in the loop. The goal, in particular, is to automatically redesign the layout of EUD interfaces to facilitate users in defining triggers and actions. For this purpose, a) we define a predictive model to characterize the composition of trigger-action rules on the basis of their final functionality; b) we adapt different optimization algorithms to explore the design space; and c) we present EUDoptimizer, the integration of our approach in IFTTT, one of the most popular EUD interfaces.We demonstrate that good layout solutions can be obtained in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, an empirical evaluation with 12 end users show evidence that EUDoptimizer reduces the efforts needed to compose trigger-action rules.