Characterizing Usability Issue Discussions in Open Source Software Projects

TL;DR

This study empirically analyzes usability issue discussions in open source software projects, revealing that such discussions are common but focus mainly on efficiency and aesthetics, involving experienced members and visual communication.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive empirical characterization of usability discussions in OSS, highlighting their scope, participant dynamics, and communication patterns.

Findings

Usability issues are extensively discussed in OSS projects.

Discussions mainly focus on efficiency and aesthetics.

Experienced members and visual communication are prominent in discussions.

Abstract

Usability is a crucial factor but one of the most neglected concerns in open source software (OSS). While far from an ideal approach, a common practice that OSS communities adopt to collaboratively address usability is through discussions on issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, there is little knowledge about the extent to which OSS community members engage in usability issue discussions, the aspects of usability they frequently target, and the characteristics of their collaboration around usability issue discussions. This knowledge is important for providing practical recommendations and research directions to better support OSS communities in addressing this important topic and improve OSS usability in general. To help achieve this goal, we performed an extensive empirical study on issues discussed in five popular OSS applications: three data science notebook projects (Jupyter Lab, Google Colab, and CoCalc) and two code editor projects (VSCode and Atom). Our results indicated that while usability issues are extensively discussed in the OSS projects, their scope tended to be limited to efficiency and aesthetics. Additionally, these issues are more frequently posted by experienced community members and display distinguishable characteristics, such as involving more visual communication and more participants. Our results provide important implications that can inform the OSS practitioners to better engage the community in usability issue discussion and shed light on future research efforts toward collaboration techniques and tools for discussing niche topics in diverse communities, such as the usability issues in the OSS context.