Designing affordances for navigating information spaces in code editors

摘要

Navigating information spaces is a fundamental yet challenging task for software developers. For example, one study found that programmers spend 35% of their time on the mechanics of navigating [7]. In another study, programmers spent 38-71% of their time foraging for information during debugging tasks [9]. This is further complicated by programmers' rapidly changing information goals [9] and mental models of the information as they navigate [6].