PWA-EU

Abstract

Progressive Web App (PWA) is a new approach to the development of mobile applications (apps) which was proposed by Google in 2015. It combines technology resources of both web and native apps. Meta-design is an End-User Development (EUD) approach from which end-users participate actively in a system's design process. Yet, PWAs are a recent technology and the impacts of associating EUD and PWAs has been little exploited. As the traditional PWA approach is limited regarding users acting as co-designers, we propose the PWA-EU approach, an extension of the traditional PWA architecture that includes EUD concepts. PWA-EU provides contributions in two lenses. First, the proposal was designed to be used by developers on the design/development time. Second, the app developed using PWA-EU approach will allow end-users to select design preferences, which makes them participants of the app's design. This active participation of end-users on the design is possible due to the meta-design concepts present on the PWA-EU approach. In this article, we present the PWA-EU approach and its evaluation in the perspective of developers/designers. For the evaluation, we grouped participants according to their professional background. The results also indicate that novice developers had a reasonable performance with only one hour of training.We conclude that even novice developers could achieve better performance in a real-life environment, in which they would have more time.