StackEmo: towards enhancing user experience by augmenting stack overflow with emojis

Abstract

Many novice programmers visit Stack Overflow for purposes that include posing questions and finding answers for issues they come across in the process of programming. Many questions have more than one correct answer on Stack Overflow, which are accompanied by number of comments from the users. Comments help developers in identifying the answer that better fits their purpose. However, it is difficult to navigate through all the comments to select an answer. Adding relevant visual cues to comments could help developers in prioritizing the comments to be read. Comments logged generally include sentiments of users, which, when depicted visually, could motivate users in reading through the comments and also help them in prioritizing the comments. However, the sentiment of comments is not being explicitly depicted on the current Stack Overflow platform. While there exist many tools that augment or annotate Stack Overflow platform for developers, we are not aware of tools that annotate visual representations of sentiments to the posts. In this paper, we propose StackEmo as a Google Chrome plugin to augment comments on Stack Overflow with emojis, based on the sentiment of the comments posted. We evaluated StackEmo through an in-user likert scale based survey with 30 university students to understand user perception towards StackEmo. The results of the survey provided us insights on improving StackEmo, with 83% of the participants willing to recommend the plugin to their peers. The source code and tool are available for download on GitHub at: https://github.com/rishalab/StackEmo, and the demo can be found here on youtube: https://youtu.be/BCFlqvMhTMA.