Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers' debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information the system is providing, they are not likely to attend to it. This paper reports a formative empirical study that sheds light on what end users actually want to know in the course of debugging a spreadsheet, given the availability of a set of interactive visual testing and debugging features. Our results provide insights into end-user debuggers' information gaps, and further suggest opportunities to improve end-user debugging systems' support for the things end-user debuggers actually want to know.
Research in learning theory has aided designers of help systems in determining education-oriented ways to present information. Many of these explanation approaches for assisting users in computing tasks remain primarily text-based. By incorporating learning theory ideas into our existing text-based explanation approach supplemented with visualizations, we hope to enhance not only the learning of, but also the productivity of end users.
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