A taxonomy of computer-supported critics

Critics have emerged over the last several years as a specific tool feature to support users in computer-mediated tasks. These computer-supported critics provide proactive guidelines or suggestions for improvement to designs, code and other digital artifacts. The concept of a critic has been adopted in various domains, including: medical (ATTENDING, ONCONCIN), programming (Lisp-Critic, RevJava), software engineering (Argo/UML, ABCDE-Critic), design sketching (Design Evaluator) and others. Critics have proven to be an effective mechanism in providing feedback to users. In this paper we propose an initial critic taxonomy based on our review of the critic literature. We present the groups and elements of the critic taxonomy and explain the groups and critic elements together some examples. We believe our taxonomy will assist others in identifying, categorizing, developing and deploying computer-supported critics in a range of domains.