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 been shown 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 13 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.

Domain-specific visual languages support high-level modeling for a wide range of application domains. However, building tools to support such languages is very challenging. We describe a set of key conceptual requirements for such tools and our approach to addressing these requirements, a set of visual language-based metatools. These support definition of metamodels, visual notations, views, modeling behaviors, design critics, and model transformations and provide a platform to realize target visual modeling tools. Extensions support collaborative work, human-centric tool interaction, and multiplatform deployment. We illustrate application of the metatoolset on tools developed with our approach. We describe tool developer and cognitive evaluations of our platform and our exemplar tools, and summarize key future research directions.

This paper presents a new approach to specifying critics for domain-specific visual language tools using a visual and template-based approach. In this paper we describe our approach for specifying critics for domain-specific visual language tools. This allows target end-user tool developers to design and implement critics efficiently in a natural manner. We describe a survey that we conducted to evaluate our new approach and the Cognitive Dimensions approach that was applied in the survey questionnaire design. Survey results are briefly discussed along with the issues raised by some respondents to improve our approach.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in using computer-based ldquocritic toolsrdquo for supporting the end-users or tool designers in analyzing and proactively improving their design artifacts. Several approaches have been applied to designing and realizing such critics, for example rule-based, pattern-matching and knowledge-based approaches. While many studies have found evidence that critic tools are an efficient feedback-providing mechanism, there is still insufficient knowledge about how to provide an effective critic authoring environment. In this paper we apply a business rule template approach as a mechanism to specify and realize critics for Marama-based domain-specific visual language tools. We describe a visual design critic authoring template approach that supports end-users or tool designers in the construction of critics for any Marama-based tools.

Critic tools have been used for many domains, including design sketches, education, general engineering, and software design. The focus of this research is to develop a generic visual critic authoring framework embedded within an end user oriented domain specific visual language meta tool. This will allow tool critic support to be rapidly developed in parallel with the tools themselves.