Enabling the diffusion of lightweight service composition approaches among end users necessitates the appropriate understanding and establishment of 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’ mental models about software services and service composition, their working practices, and identify users’ expectations and problems of service composition. 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 end users”, there is evidence of a conceptual issue concerning understanding the notion of service composition (i.e. end users do not think about nor do they understand connections between services). This paper discusses various conceptual and usability problems of service composition and proposes recommendations to resolve them.