Critic Specification for Domain-Specific Visual Language Tools

Abstract

In recent years we have observed the extensive evolution of tools and techniques that work with the user to achieve a range of computer-mediated tasks. One of these support techniques is the use of critics. Critics have evolved over the last few years as specific tool features to support users in computer-mediated tasks by providing guidelines or suggestions for improvement to designs, code and other digital artefacts. Some critics may also facilitate semi-automatically improving a design for the tool user. Although critics have been used widely in very diverse domains, such as education, programming and product design tools, critic authoring continues to be a challenge. In addition critic approaches have not been applied within meta-modelling tools that implement domain-specific visual language (DSVL) tools. The main research question in this research project is “Can critic specification and implementation for domain specific visual languages be made accessible to tool end-users?” Hence, the aim of this research is to design and develop a prototype for a critic specification tool that allows the end-user tool developers to readily express and construct critics for a DSVL tool. The research involved several steps to attain the research aim. The initial phase of this research has produced a taxonomy of computer-supported critic approaches and led to the identification of key requirements of a critic specification tool. The intermediate phase involved the incremental development of prototypes demonstrating a proof of concept for a critic specification tool. A notational representation and a template-based approach were developed for the final prototype of the critic specification tool and demonstrated via three different domains of DSVL exemplar tools. The final phase of this research addresses the evaluation of the critic specification approach via an end user evaluation which took into account usability aspects and the Cognitive Dimensions framework. This research has contributed to the development of a critic specification approach for DSVL tools based on a notational representation and a critic authoring template-based approach to support tool end users in specifying critics.