Lost while Searching: Difficulties in Information Seeking among End-User Programmers

摘要

End-user programmers, those who write code but lack formaltraining in computer science, are often reliant on varioustools such as API documentation or searching the Web forinformation in order to complete a specific task. This studyexamines the information foraging behaviors of a group ofweb and graphic designers engaged in a series of code modificationtasks. We find that users were largely unsuccessful intheir foraging activities, with few information seeking eventsresulting in noticeable changes to participants’ source code.Participants viewed remarkably few results generated by theirqueries and rarely refined queries multiple times. However,these kinds of activities were positively correlated with tasksuccess metrics. We conclude with a discussion of the study’sresults and their implications on the design of future programmingenvironments and search tools for end-user programmers.