Co-Designing Web Interfaces for Code Comparison

Developers use the internet to find, learn about, and reuse code. During these processes, developers explore alternative programs whose syntactic differences may be subtle yet behavioral differences significant, and vice versa. Unfortunately, accurate comprehension is time-consuming and error-prone, to say nothing of code comparison. Given these circumstances, we run a collaborative design activity to explore how web interfaces can support better code comparison for search and reuse. We recruited 11 developers from academia and industry to discuss potential designs for three online contexts: searching, recommending, and learning. For each context, we collaboratively sketched interfaces that may support developers’ present goals without the technical limitations of current approaches. We report the patterns of features and arrangements that developers want from current and future interfaces, distinguishing the statically discoverable information from the dynamically produced.