A Mobile Graph-Like Visual Programming Language

Abstract: Visual programming is a programming paradigm commonly used for game scripting, it also has applications in other areas such as for example patcher languages for music and animation and even a few languages for general purpose programming. By using visual programming complex tasks can be made easier by abstracting the code and letting the user express a flow of commands instead. This also gives a better overview of the problem and how the different parts connect. By graphically connecting nodes the program flow will be made clear even for those new to programming. Unfortunately, visual programming is mostly limited to laptops and stationary computer systems. Touch enabled mobile devices which perhaps would be even better suited for a visual programming approach are left with textual programming environments, which doesn’t use the capabilities of the touch screen, and a few non-graph-like visual programming languages, which use interlocked blocks to represent code. To explore how well graph-like visual programming would work on mobile devices a study will be conducted in which a lo-fi design is created and iteratively evaluated and improved using a modified NEVO process. The design will be created and improved based on existing visual programming interfaces and research in the area of visual programming, interaction design and information design, combined with the input from the test subjects. In this work a mobile, visual, graph-like, general purpose programming language has been designed. A lo-fi prototype of the language has been created to display how the language would look on a mobile system if realized. The lo-fi prototype was then tested with a method given by Rettig to give an indication of the systems usability measured by its task completion time compared to the task completion time of a mobile textual system. There is also a qualitative analysis on the responses from the test users. The tests were conducted both on people new to programming as well as people who have been programming for a while.