Usability in the Free/Open Source Software Community

ABSTRACT:  In the past 10 years, free/open source software
(FOSS) has become an integral part of the computing landscape. But in
the absence of economic incentives, why should open source developers
be concerned with the usability of the software they produce?

In this talk, I describe results from an interview study of 27
individuals, from 11 different projects, that examined how FOSS
developers think about, act on, and are motivated by usability issues.

Our results reveal that the primary motivator for attending to
usability needs is high quality, positive feedback from respected
end-users during development, rather than the desire to increase the
software’s user base, as is commonly perceived. Our results also
indicate that, collectively, the open source community has a rather
sophisticated understanding of usability and usability issues, even if
the community is still developing methods to address usability needs in
their development processes. Collectively, our findings suggest a need
to reconceptualize and transform HCI methods to operate within an
environment for which economic incentives are not a motivator for
making software usable.

BIO: Michael Terry, a GVU alum, is an assistant professor in the
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of
Waterloo, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab
(hci.uwaterloo.ca). His research focuses on developing, deploying, and
evaluating new tools to support usability needs in free/open source
software development. As part of this research, his group created
ingimp (http://www.ingimp.org), an
instrumented version of GIMP that provides the first rich, large-scale
characterization of how an open source application is used "in the
wild" on a day-to-day basis. All data from the project are publicly
available for analysis and use in research.