“to understand current practices and obstacles to change”
“focus on projects carried out by small groups of volunteer”
Study in [1] consists of 3 element: "(1) an online questionnaire survey answered by contributors to a variety of OSS projects, (2) interviews with three OSS developers and (3) interviews with five usability evaluators for OSS projects."
Questionnaire consisted of 3 parts: ‘About your current project’, ‘Commu-nication’ and ‘Usability’. The questionnaire quantitative data collected was organized in sections reflecting the 3 focus areas of the questionnaire.
The developer Interviews was preformed with 3 of the respondents (2 project managers and 1 usability tester) from the questionnaire survey. This interview investigated the following themes:
• Respondent’s motivation for contributing to OSS
• Usability considerations used in the project
• Frequency and place of usability evaluations
• Usability as a part of the development process
• Usability experts in the development team
• Willingness to alter program code because of usability problems discovered in tests
• Decision making in the project, especially regar-ding usability
To analyse the data collected in the interviews:
"First we identified a number of topics or tendencies we found impor-tant in the transcriptions. Following this, we analyzed the statements in more detail to extract the overall opinion of the respondent."
Finally, the evaluator Interviews are involved 5 employees at Relevantive who had experience in OSS development and usability engineering. This interview investigated the following themes:
The evaluator interviews are conducted in the following procedure:
• Test procedures of OSS
• Usability evaluation
• Communication with OSS developers
• K Desktop Environment (KDE) guidelines
• Remote usability evaluation
• OSS and usability in general
Following the above procedure, they had conducted personal interviews with 2 employees:
“For these interviews we did not use a pre-constructed interview guide, but instead we used the data collected from the focus group interview to find themes to explore further. Third, we had the opportunity to observe them while they conducted a usability test of an OSS product.”
The data collected in the evaluator interviews was analysed the same way as data in the developer interviews.
By analysing the collected data, [1] has shown the reasons why people are motivated to contribute to OSS:
“In the questionnaire answers, 88% of the developers chose ‘To strengthen free software’ as their motivation,…, and the interviews with developers and usability professionals supported this. In addition, 54% of the questionnaire respondents choose ‘Community reputation’ as a motivation….75% of the developers contribute to OSS in order to improve their skills and 88% wanted to be intellectually stimulated.”
[1] states that “83% of the questionnaire respondents regarded the importance of usability as either ‘high’, ‘very high’, or ‘extremely high’. Only 13% considered it ‘moderate’, 4% stated ‘slight’ and nobody though it had no importance,…”
The study shows that OSS developers have different definition of “usability” too. In addition, OSS developers also had shown reluctance working with usability experts even though they wanted a higher degree of usability in their software.
OSS development process is characterized by short iterative cycles consisting 4 main stages: “In the beginning”, “Iteratively”, “In the end”, and “During testing”. And the OSS developers had different ideas on when usability belonged in the development process.
This paper also suggests that trust relationship is required between OSS developers and usability experts prior the cooperation between the two:
“For instance Relevantive experienced that almost all problems faced when working with OSS developers were grounded in lack of trust, which made developers ignore suggestions from usability professionals.”
OSS projects in general had flat, and organizational structures OSS development is always democratic while the traditional development process is led by a formal leadership:
“…even though almost every OSS project had at least one project manager associated, this title did not imply leadership over the project. Often this title reflected the person who founded the project rather than the person who kept track of everything or delegated tasks to other contributors.”
[1] states 3 common mantras about OSS:
- OSS development is always democratic
- OSS will solve the ‘software crisis’
- Usability problems are just bugs
[2] is intended to answer the following questions:
• How do open source developers define and conceptualize the notion of usability?
• What motivations do FOSS developers have for creating software that is usable by people other than themselves?
• What are current usability practices in the FOSS community?
• How do FOSS usability practices differ from traditional usability practices?
The interview process in [2] consists of the following segments:
“1. Obtaining basic background information on the participant, such as their day job and what FOSS project they are associated with
2. Learning how and when they got involved with their FOSS project. If they were a project member, we also asked what they do in the project and why they stay involved
3. Their perception of the concept of “usability”
4. How they practice or perceive others practicing usability in the project”
One interesting thing to be noted is that the interview participants could define “usability” anyway they want during the interview:
“As can be seen, the definitions of usability span the range of definitions commonly found in the HCI textbooks, and demonstrate that the community, as a whole, possesses a fairly sophisticated, well-rounded notion of the concept.”
There are a number of ways to improve the usability such as interactions between developers and end-users. Tool such as IRC and mailing lists are the communication channels between developers and end-users. However, user does not explain the problem thoroughly and makes it really hard for the developer to help.
Developers do not really use the application they built. The feedback from the user community and the application tests are important to build more stable version of the application.
Usability experts need to educate FOSS project members “about how to think about and practice usability/UX on a day-to-day basis” when they join the FOSS projects.
Social relationships between usability experts and developers serve as primary motivators for addressing usability issue on a day-to-day basis.
The software user size and praise and positive feedback from the users are what motivating the OSS developers to look into the usability issue.
[2] finalizes that the usability and HCI of OSS applications can be improved in the following 2 perspectives:
- Improving Practices from within the FOSS Community
- Reconceptualizing HCI for FOSS Development
REFERENCE
[1] http://itc.ktu.lt/itc353/stage353.pdf
[2] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753476
[3] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753576
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