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How Do Users Discover New Tools in Software Development and Beyond?

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Abstract

Software users rely on software tools such as browser tab controls and spell checkers to work effectively and efficiently, but it is difficult for users to be aware of all the tools that might be useful to them. While there are several potential technical solutions to this difficulty, we know little about social solutions, such as one user telling a peer about a tool. To explore these social solutions, we conducted two studies, an interview study and a diary study. The interview study describes a series of interviews with 18 programmers in industry to explore how tool discovery takes place. To broaden our findings to a wider group of software users, we then conducted a diary study of 76 software users in their workplaces. One finding was that social learning of software tools, while sometimes effective, is infrequent; software users appear to discover tools from peers only once every few months. We describe several implications of our findings, such as that discovery from peers can be enhanced by improving software users’ ability to communicate openly and concisely about tools.

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Notes

  1. In the reports, we used a term “feature” rather than “tool” because we felt it was more understandable to general software users. We will continue to use the word “tool” in this paper for consistency. Nonetheless, the definition we gave participants in the diary study for “features” was the same one we gave interviewees for “tools,” that is, “something that helps you perform a task.”

  2. A direct quote from YIT.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the interview participants. Thanks also to Christian Bird, Andrew Black, Kellogg Booth, Giuseppe Carenini, Cristina Conati, Nando de Freitas, William Griswold, Ciarán Llachlan Leavitt, Karon MacLean, Rahul Pandita, Nancy Perry, Kenneth Reeder, Martin Robillard, Claudia Rocha, Martin Schulz, Jonathan Sillito, Laurie Williams, Phil Winne, Petcharat Viriyakattiyaporn, and the members of the Software Practices Lab and Interaction Design Reading Group at UBC for their help, during various stages of this research. This work was supported by IBM, NSERC, as well as by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1252995.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Emerson Murphy-Hill & Da Young Lee

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Gail C. Murphy & Joanna McGrenere

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  1. Emerson Murphy-Hill
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Correspondence to Emerson Murphy-Hill.

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Murphy-Hill, E., Lee, D.Y., Murphy, G.C. et al. How Do Users Discover New Tools in Software Development and Beyond?. Comput Supported Coop Work 24, 389–422 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-015-9230-9

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