A Comparative Evaluation of Tabs and Linked Panels for Program Understanding in Augmented Reality

Integrated development environments (IDEs) commonly employ a tab-based interface for displaying source code, which often poses challenges in efficient code navigation and retrieval. Previous research has proposed several novel approaches that have in common that they place code fragments on a 2D canvas and draw visual connections between them. In this paper, we investigate the extension of such interfaces to augmented reality (AR) environments. As AR allows to display information in three dimensions, the restriction to a 2D canvas for placing code fragments is not justified, and we implement it by allowing users to place code panels freely in 3D space. We call the resulting interface linked panels. We present the results of a quantitative user study conducted with 24 participants, aiming to explore whether the benefits observed for the canvas-based approach in traditional 2D screen environments can be replicated with linked panels in augmented reality. The participants were given tasks to identify and resolve two bugs in two different software projects using the traditional tab-based and the panel-based approaches in AR. To find possible explanations of our quantitative results we also conducted a qualitative analysis evaluating participants' comments and different placement strategies of panels in the panel-based approach. Our results indicate that participants found more bugs with the tabs-version, but were equally fast with both tools. We also found that less skilled participants were faster with the tabs, while more skilled ones were faster with the panels. Although, participants experienced problems with the cluttered spatial arrangement of the panels, they preferred the panels version over the tabs version as it made better use of AR.