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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1902.07704,
title = {How Do the Open Source Communities Address Usability and UX Issues? An Exploratory Study},
author = {Jinghui Cheng and Jin L. C. Guo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.07704},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
The 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018) Late-Breaking Work