Title:
Usability in the Free/Open Source Software Community
Date:
Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 1:00pm
Location:
E3-304 EITC Building, University of Manitoba Fort Garry Campus
Speaker:
Dr. Michael Terry
Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Abstract:
In the past 10 years, free/open source software (FOSS) has become an integral
part of the computing landscape. But in the absence of economic incentives, why should open source developers be concerned with the usability of the software they produce?
In this talk, I describe results from an interview study of 27 individuals, from 11 different projects, that examined how FOSS developers think about, act on, and are motivated by usability issues. Our results reveal that the primary motivator for attending to usability needs is high quality, positive feedback from respected end-users during development, rather than the desire to increase the software’s user base, as is commonly perceived. Our results also indicate that, collectively, the open source community has a rather sophisticated understanding of usability and usability issues, even if the community is still developing methods to address usability needs in their development processes. Collectively, our findings suggest a need to reconceptualize and transform usability methods to operate within an environment for which economic incentives are not a motivator for making software usable.
Speaker Bio:
Michael Terry is an assistant professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab (hci.uwaterloo.ca). His research focuses on developing, deploying, and evaluating new tools to support usability needs in free/open source software development. As part of this research, his group created ingimp (http://www.ingimp.org), an instrumented version of GIMP that provides the first rich, large-scale characterization of how an open source application is used “in the wild” on a day-to-day basis. All data from the project are publicly available for analysis and use in research.
Cost:
This will be a free event.
Contact:
If you would like additional information or if you might be interested in presenting a seminar, please contact Steph Durocher or the Department of Computer Science.
