Abstract

 
 
 As a result of the growth of non-developer users of OSS applications, usability has over the last ten years begun to attract the interest of the OSS community. The OSS community has some special characteristics which are an obstacle to the direct adoption of many usability techniques as specified in the HCI field. The aim of this research is to adapt and evaluate the feasibility of applying the Personas usability technique to one OSS project from the viewpoint of the development team. The applied research method was a case study of the following OSS project LibreOffice-Writer. We formalized the application procedure of the adapted usability technique. We found that either there were no procedures for adopting usability technique in OSS or they were not fully systematized. Additionally, we identified the adverse conditions that are an obstacle to their adoption in OSS and propose the special adaptations required to overcome the obstacles. To avoid some of the adverse conditions, we created web artefacts (e.g. wiki) that are very popular in the OSS field. Additionally, we found that there are obstacles to the application of the technique. Despite these obstacles, it is feasible to apply the adapted Personas technique in OSS project.
 
 
Highlights
Open source software (OSS) has spread so swiftly that it rivals commercial software systems in terms of deployment [1]
In the empirical study conducted by Raza et al [22], 60% of respondents claimed that poor usability is the main obstacle to be overcome by OSS applications in order to encourage users to migrate from commercial software [21]
Technique adaptations are necessary to address some adverse conditions caused by OSS development characteristics that are an obstacle to the application of techniques prescribed by the human-computer interaction (HCI) area
Summary
Open source software (OSS) has spread so swiftly that it rivals commercial software systems in terms of deployment [1]. In the empirical study conducted by Raza et al [22], 60% of respondents (non-developer users) claimed that poor usability is the main obstacle to be overcome by OSS applications in order to encourage users to migrate from commercial software [21]. The main reasons for the generally poor usability of OSS developments are: OSS developers have tended to develop software for themselves [4][23], the developer community is very much in the dark about who its users are [19][24], OSS communities operate according to a meritocracy based on software code input, and, due to the unavailability of resources, testing and bug reporting are almost exclusively conducted by volunteers and end users [7]
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