TY - GEN
T1 - Perceptions and practices of usability in the free/open source software (FOSS) community
AU - Terry, Michael
AU - Kay, Matthew
AU - Lafreniere, Ben
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - This paper presents results from a study examining perceptions and practices of usability in the free/open source software (FOSS) community. 27 individuals associated with 11 different FOSS projects were interviewed to understand how they think about, act on, and are motivated to address usability issues. Our results indicate that FOSS project members possess rather sophisticated notions of software usability, which collectively mirror definitions commonly found in HCI textbooks. Our study also uncovered a wide range of practices that ultimately work to improve software usability. Importantly, these activities are typically based on close, direct interpersonal relationships between developers and their core users, a group of users who closely follow the project and provide high quality, respected feedback. These relationships, along with positive feedback from other users, generate social rewards that serve as the primary motivations for attending to usability issues on a day-to-day basis. These findings suggest a need to reconceptualize HCI methods to better fit this culture of practice and its corresponding value system.
AB - This paper presents results from a study examining perceptions and practices of usability in the free/open source software (FOSS) community. 27 individuals associated with 11 different FOSS projects were interviewed to understand how they think about, act on, and are motivated to address usability issues. Our results indicate that FOSS project members possess rather sophisticated notions of software usability, which collectively mirror definitions commonly found in HCI textbooks. Our study also uncovered a wide range of practices that ultimately work to improve software usability. Importantly, these activities are typically based on close, direct interpersonal relationships between developers and their core users, a group of users who closely follow the project and provide high quality, respected feedback. These relationships, along with positive feedback from other users, generate social rewards that serve as the primary motivations for attending to usability issues on a day-to-day basis. These findings suggest a need to reconceptualize HCI methods to better fit this culture of practice and its corresponding value system.
KW - bleeding edge users
KW - core users
KW - reference users
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U2 - 10.1145/1753326.1753476
DO - 10.1145/1753326.1753476
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:77953997565
SN - 9781605589299
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 999
EP - 1008
BT - CHI 2010 - The 28th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Conference Proceedings
T2 - 28th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2010
Y2 - 10 April 2010 through 15 April 2010
ER -