Abstract:
Critics have emerged in recent times as a specific tool feature to support users in computer-mediated tasks. These computer-supported critics provide proactive guidelines or suggestions for improvement to designs, code and other digital artifacts. The concept of a critic has been adopted in various domains including: medical, programming, software engineering, design sketching and others. Critics have proven to be an effective mechanism for providing feedback to users. We propose a new critic taxonomy based on extensive review of the critic literature. The groups and elements of our critic taxonomy are presented and explained collectively with examples, including the mapping of thirteen existing critic tools, predominantly for software engineering and programming education tasks, to the taxonomy. We believe this critic taxonomy will assist others in identifying, categorizing, developing and deploying computer-supported critics in a range of domains.