How Do the Open Source Communities Address Usability and UX Issues? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Usability and user experience (UX) issues are often not well emphasized and addressed in open source software (OSS) development. There is an imperative need for supporting OSS communities to collaboratively identify, understand, and fix UX design issues in a distributed environment. In this paper, we provide an initial step towards this effort and report on an exploratory study that investigated how the OSS communities currently reported, discussed, negotiated, and eventually addressed usability and UX issues. We conducted in-depth qualitative analysis of selected issue tracking threads from three OSS projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings indicated that discussions about usability and UX issues in OSS communities were largely influenced by the personal opinions and experiences of the participants. Moreover, the characteristics of the community may have greatly affected the focus of such discussion.

The 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018) Late-Breaking Work

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• "Ohhh, He's the Boss!": Unpacking Power Dynamics Among Developers, Designers, and End-Users in FLOSS Usability
• Untold Stories: Unveiling the Scarce Contributions of UX Professionals to Usability Issue Discussions of Open Source Software Projects