Cheng, J. and Guo, J.L.C. 2018. How Do the Open Source Communities Address Usability and UX Issues?: An Exploratory Study. Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1–6.

[anakinsbrna]

Notes while reading:

• OSS often does not have resources for usability and UX
• poor UX and usability is one of the core issues hindering user adoption
• participants of OSS communities don’t value contribution for good UX - they value quality of source code and feature contributions
• this results in power differences and political conflicts among developers, UX practicioners and users of an OSS system
• paper focuses on how usability/UX issues are currently addressed in open source projects - looked at 3 different ones: Atom, Esclipse Che, and OpenToonz

They analyzed issue thread from 3 different projects and identified different themes arranged on the life caclye of the usability/UX issues

1. issue reporting
2. current state
3. desired state

• tentative design/solutions
• feedback and responses
• clarifications
• learning from another software

4. commitment

• encourage others to contribute
• offer to contribute or collaborate
• need to prioritize
• plan to fix soon

5. fix/implementation

[anakinsbrna]

according to the paper, UX/Usability issues are often used as concrete tasks to encourage others to contribute (e.g., E.g., in Atom 307, “If you want this to happen faster, perhaps you could also give that a try and post a report here or somewhere else.” And in OpenToonz 102, “Would it be possible for some programmer to expose this functionality to the gui?")
and UX/Usability tasks are popular for people who start to contribute (e.g., in Atom 5344, a participant offered to fix the issue by posting: “I’m looking for an entry point to contribute to Atom, and seeing this as is a beginner issue, thought I could work on this?”)
Based on those insights, I was thinking of the "Needs UX label of Home Assistant - I think those issues are all brought to our internal designers

I see in this finding an opportunity to engage new contributors - and design contributors - while at the same time disburden the OHF designers: instead of assigning the "needs UX" issues to the internal designers, these tasks could be highlighted as an entry point for general contributors and for design contributors specifically

@matthiasdebaat
What do you think?

and thanks to @Erioldoesdesign for sharing this paper!

[matthiasdebaat]

Based on those insights, I was thinking of the "Needs UX label of Home Assistant - I think those issues are all brought to our internal designers

I see in this finding an opportunity to engage new contributors - and design contributors - while at the same time disburden the OHF designers: instead of assigning the "needs UX" issues to the internal designers, these tasks could be highlighted as an entry point for general contributors and for design contributors specifically

Yes, fully agree. Community designers could already contribute this way today, we just haven't onboarded them or made it explicit that "needs UX" issues are a valid entry point for design contributions.

One of the things on my todo list.

[Erioldoesdesign]

We also did a podcast episode with these researchers! https://sosdesign.sustainoss.org/15