How Do Open Source Software Contributors Perceive and Address Usability?: Valued Factors, Practices, and Challenges

Abstract

Usability is an increasing concern in open source software (OSS). Given the recent changes in the OSS landscape, it is imperative to examine the OSS contributors' current valued factors, practices, and challenges concerning usability. We accumulated this knowledge through a survey with a wide range of contributors to OSS applications. Through analyzing 84 survey responses, we found that many participants recognized the importance of usability. While most relied on issue tracking systems to collect user feedback, a few participants also adopted typical user-centered design methods. However, most participants demonstrated a system-centric rather than a usercentric view. Understanding the diverse needs and consolidating various feedback of end-users posed unique challenges for the OSS contributors when addressing usability in the most recent development context. Our work provided important insights for OSS practitioners and tool designers in exploring ways for promoting a user-centric mindset and improving usability practice in the current OSS communities.

Analyzing User Involvement Practice: A Case Study

“…Our own research shows a similar scenario, with the user experience professionals responsible for the whole company's user-centered services, which needs to be achieved at the same time as adhering to their own standards. Nevertheless, to realize such an effective merging of departmental priorities, there are numerous hurdles to overcome that are holding back the usability experts from having a profound impact on earlier stages of development [31,32]. Currently, no clear information is obtainable regarding how well these efforts are progressing, as our focus has been on available user involvement channels as opposed to any that are in development.…”

Facilitating Asynchronous Participatory Design of Open Source Software: Bringing End Users into the Loop

“…OSS has certainly garnered certain reputation for being 'by developers for developers'; prior work explored by Nichols and Twidale (2002) has stated a sense of 'elitism' among the OSS developers where pride was drawn The system integrates design practices into an existing development pipeline. Mindset [16]; Pipeline* D3 OSS-D are able to generate artifacts from interacting with end users.…”

“…Much of this practice relies on the principles of participatory design, which places emphasis on the involvement and collaboration of all stakeholders, especially end users [6]. While user participation in the design process is vital for achieving successful usability of an OSS, it is often pushed aside as teams adapt to asynchronous, remote working and focus on a project's code and functionality [13,16].…”

“…Due to its affinity for supporting various asynchronous activities, GitHub has enabled a vibrant community for remote collaboration and development of OSS projects. While there are many tools that can potentially be used for monitoring usability interests on GitHub OSS's, such as Issue tracking, there is currently no mature method for end user community collaboration [13,15,16]. Consequently, if any design decisions are made through input from end users, there are difficulties with properly communicating these decisions to other team members due to a lack of design artifacts clearly documenting the process.…”

“…Many OSS systems, as a result, are designed without direct input from end users. While prior work explored the pitfalls of end user community involvement in OSS design [1,12,13,16], as of yet, there have been little contribution to the open source community offering a solution to this problem.…”