Putting a Face to the Issue: Fostering User Empathy of Open Source Software Developers With PersonaFlow

TL;DR

PersonaFlow is a tool that generates and integrates user personas into OSS issue tracking to enhance developer empathy and improve user-centered responses.

Contribution

It introduces PersonaFlow, a novel tool that creates editable personas from OSS artifacts and demonstrates its impact on developer empathy and behavior.

Findings

Most developers reported a shift in understanding users.

Over half modified responses with empathetic language or tailored explanations.

Both emotional and pragmatic uses of personas led to more user-centered behavior.

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) developers often struggle to understand and respond to user context, while existing tools, such as issue trackers (for handling bugs, requests, and feedback), largely focus on technical discussion. Although personas could help, limited resources and UX expertise make them hard to scale. We present PersonaFlow, a tool that generates editable user personas from OSS repository artifacts and integrates them alongside issue reports. In a user study with 13 OSS developers, most reported shifts in how they understood users, and more than half modified their responses by adding empathetic language, tailoring explanations, or raising priority ratings. We found two pathways to this change: some connected emotionally to personas as people, while others used them pragmatically for triaging. Both appeared to lead to more user-centered behavior. We contribute design implications for persona-based tools relevant to OSS and other contexts where efficiency-driven systems or workflows obscure valuable human elements.