Wandercode: An Interaction Design for Code Recommenders to Reduce Information Overload, Ease Exploration, and Save Screen Space
Austin Z. Henley, David Shepherd, and Scott D. Fleming

TL;DR
Wandercode introduces a new interaction design for code recommenders that reduces information overload, supports better exploration, and optimizes screen space, validated through user testing in a code editor extension.
Contribution
The paper presents Wandercode, a novel graph-based interaction design for code recommenders, along with a set of design dimensions to guide future development.
Findings
Wandercode enabled faster task completion.
It reduced users' cognitive load.
Participants viewed Wandercode more favorably.
Abstract
In this paper, we present Wandercode, a novel interaction design for recommender systems that recommend code locations to aid programmers in software development tasks. In particular, our design aims to improve upon prior designs by reducing information overload, by better supporting the exploration of recommendations, and by making more efficient use of screen space. During our design process, we developed a set of design dimensions to aid others in the design of code recommenders. To validate our design, we implemented a prototype of our design as an Atom code editor extension with support for the Java programming language, and conducted an empirical user evaluation comparing our graph-based Wandercode design to a control design representative of prior list-based interaction designs for code recommenders. The results showed that, compared with the control design, Wandercode helped…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPersonal Information Management and User Behavior
