Crystalline: Lowering the Cost for Developers to Collect and Organize Information for Decision Making
This addresses the problem of time-consuming online sensemaking for developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior tools for information capture and organization.
The paper tackles the laborious process of manual information collection and organization for developers by introducing Crystalline, a system that automatically collects and organizes web information into tabular structures, resulting in developers creating comparison tables about 20% faster with a 60% reduction in operational cost.
Developers perform online sensemaking on a daily basis, such as researching and choosing libraries and APIs. Prior research has introduced tools that help developers capture information from various sources and organize it into structures useful for subsequent decision-making. However, it remains a laborious process for developers to manually identify and clip content, maintaining its provenance and synthesizing it with other content. In this work, we introduce a new system called Crystalline that attempts to automatically collect and organize information into tabular structures as the user searches and browses the web. It leverages natural language processing to automatically group similar criteria together to reduce clutter as well as passive behavioral signals such as mouse movement and dwell time to infer what information to collect and how to visualize and prioritize it. Our user study suggests that developers are able to create comparison tables about 20% faster with a 60% reduction in operational cost without sacrificing the quality of the tables.