Usability in the Free/Open Source Software Community

Speaker
Mike Terry
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

In the past 10 years, the free/open source software (FOSS) community has demonstrated effective new ways to develop software. However, it is just beginning to develop practices to address usability needs. 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 show that FOSS developers possess rather sophisticated notions of software usability, similar to those found in HCI textbooks. Results also reveal that the primary motivator for attending to usability is the high quality, positive feedback received from respected end-users during development, rather than the desire to increase the software’s user base, as is commonly perceived. Finally, I describe some of the unique ways we found FOSS developers attend to usability issues, including the use of “reference users,” or users close to the project who provide continual feedback on emerging designs. Collectively, these findings suggest a need to reconceptualize HCI methods to better integrate with the distinct reward structure and work practices of FOSS development.

Speaker's Bio

Michael Terry 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. 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, 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. Importantly, all data from the project are publicly available for analysis and use in research.

Host
Anind Dey