Mashup services to daily activities: end-user perspective in designing a consumer mashups

Mashups have been gaining wide popularity over the past few years. Several tools and platforms exist to support user-created mashups, however working with them is still complex, and their inability to directly impact existing activities and daily lives of endusers provide little motivation for their adoption and sustained use. This paper aims to design and implement a user-centered mashup system which provides greater motivation for mashups usage, by relating every-day calendar events to useful gadgets. The system offers high level of abstraction to end users, which eliminates the need for programming and the burden of knowing about data flows from one service to the other. The platform exhibits context-orientation, personalization and socialization features which are believed to improve user experience in the system. Strong focus on functionality integration rather than data integration is believed to create greater usefulness and motivation in using the system. The system is evaluated by 131 end-users to test for usability. Also, the system is used as a representative example in proposing a user-acceptance model for consumer mashups.