Háskóli ÍslandsUniversity of IcelandSamuelsson, Sigurdur GautiBook, Matthias2021-01-292021-01-292020-11-04Sigurdur Gauti Samuelsson and Matthias Book. 2020. Eliciting Sketched Expressions of Command Intentions in an IDE. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, ISS, Article 200 (November 2020), 25 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/34273282573-0142https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/2434Software engineers routinely use sketches (informal, ad-hoc drawings) to visualize and communicate complex ideas for colleagues or themselves. We hypothesize that sketching could also be used as a novel interaction modality in integrated software development environments (IDEs), allowing developers to express desired source code manipulations by sketching right on top of the IDE, rather than remembering keyboard shortcuts or using a mouse to navigate menus and dialogs. For an initial assessment of the viability of this idea, we conducted an elicitation study that prompted software developers to express a number of common IDE commands through sketches. For many of our task prompts, we observed considerable agreement in how developers would express the respective commands through sketches, suggesting that further research on a more formal sketch-based visual command language for IDEs would be worthwhile.200eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessSketchingUser interfacesSoftware development environmentsElicitation studyHugbúnaðargerðHugbúnaðarverkfræðiinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3427328