Cracking the Bottleneck of Productivity by Enhancing Discoverability Leveraging interaction design to enhance discoverability of reusable code components.

Abstract

In the landscape of digital companies, speed, efficiency and productivity have become important tools to master in order to retain the customers of today and win the customers of tomorrow. However, previous research within the realm of productivity in software driven companies indicate that measuring and, thereby controlling, productivity in software development projects is difficult. Instead, many organizations have reverted to aiding developers in being as productive as possible by removing obstacles and productivity bottlenecks. This master’s thesis project explores how to leverage discoverability as a means to positively impact productivity by enhancing discovery and interpretability of reusable code. The investigation of the topic is built upon studying previous academic literature as well as thorough qualitative research on productivity and discoverability problems within a large software driven enterprise. This research consisted mainly of user research in the form of interviews and focus groups that was used as fuel for the exploratory design work that followed, with the final goal of presenting a list of user experience factors to consider when designing for discoverability. Alongside the formulation of these factors, a design concept manifesting the factors whilst addressing found issues of code exploration and evaluation was developed in an iterative design thinking approach. The result is a marketplace solution that surfaces reusable code components to developers via their intended use cases. Finally a set of 15 user experience factors were formulated, aiming to inform design decisions on discovery and interpretability in future developments of enterprise software.