# How Do the Open Source Communities Address Usability and UX Issues? An Exploratory Study

## TL;DR

This study explores how open source communities report, discuss, and address usability and UX issues, revealing that personal opinions and community characteristics significantly influence these discussions.

## Contribution

It provides an initial qualitative analysis of OSS community interactions regarding usability and UX issues, highlighting the influence of personal opinions and community traits.

## Key findings

- Discussions are largely opinion-driven.
- Community characteristics influence UX focus.
- UX issues are often underemphasized in OSS.

## Abstract

Usability and user experience (UX) issues are often not well emphasized and addressed in open source software (OSS) development. There is an imperative need for supporting OSS communities to collaboratively identify, understand, and fix UX design issues in a distributed environment. In this paper, we provide an initial step towards this effort and report on an exploratory study that investigated how the OSS communities currently reported, discussed, negotiated, and eventually addressed usability and UX issues. We conducted in-depth qualitative analysis of selected issue tracking threads from three OSS projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings indicated that discussions about usability and UX issues in OSS communities were largely influenced by the personal opinions and experiences of the participants. Moreover, the characteristics of the community may have greatly affected the focus of such discussion.