From the assignment 7, I choose one article that was posted by Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo, the article was "Usability and Open Source Software"
Usability and Open Source Software
David M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale*
Department of Computer Science
University of Waikato, Hamilton New Zealand
David M. Nichols and Michael B. Twidale*
Department of Computer Science
University of Waikato, Hamilton New Zealand
Summary
The study reviews the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discusses how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. It describes how existing human computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities of developers and users to address issues of usability.
Evaluation
When I was half way reading this paper, I was thinking that the development of open-source software overlooked the importance of good usability. But when I was done reading, it made me conclude that open source community was just increasing its awareness of the usability issues. Improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop. Improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread of factors involved.
Summary:
The open source community is increasing its awareness of usability issues. This paper has identified certain barriers to usability and explored how these are being and can be addressed. Several of the approaches directly mirror the problems identified. The automated evaluation where there is a shortage of human expertise and encourage various kinds of end user and usability expert participation to re-balance the development community for the average users. If traditional OSS development is about scratching a personal itch, usability is about being aware of and concerned about the itches of others. Deeper investigation of the issues outlined in this paper could take various forms. One of the great advantages of OSS development is that its process is to a large extent visible and recorded. A study of the archives of projects will enable a verification of the claims and hypotheses ventured here, as well as the uncovering of a richer understanding of the nature of current usability discussions and development work. Example questions include: “Do certain types of usability issues figure disproportionately in discussions and development effort, leaving others ignored or underdeveloped?”, “What distinguishes OSS projects that are especially innovative in their functionality and interface designs?” and “Can interface design consistency be preserved in the traditional modular OSS development environment?” The approaches outlined in the previous section need further investigation and indeed experimentation to see if they can be feasibly used in OSS projects, without disrupting the factors that make traditional functionality-centric OSS development so effective. These approaches are not necessarily restricted to OSS; several can be applied to proprietary software. Indeed the ideas derived from discount usability engineering and participatory design originated in developing better proprietary software. However, they may be even more appropriate for open source development in that they map well on to the strengths of a volunteer developer community with open discussion. Most HCI research has concentrated on pre-release activities that inform design and relatively little on post-release techniques (Hartson and Castillo, 1998; Smilowitz et al., 1994). It is noteworthy that participatory design is a field in its own right whereas participative usage is usually quickly passed over by HCI textbooks. Thus OSS development in this case need not merely play catch-up with the greater end user focus of the commercial world, but potentially can innovate in exploring how to involve end users in subsequent redesign. There have been several calls in the literature (Shneiderman 2002; Lieberman and Fry, 2001; Fischer, 1998) for users to become more involved in software development beyond standard user-centred design activities (such as usability testing, prototype evaluation and fieldwork observation). It is noticeable that these comments seem to ignore that this involvement is already happening in OSS projects. Raymond (1998) comments that “debugging is parallelizable”, we can add to this that usability reporting, analysis and testing is also parallelisable. However certain aspects of usability design do not appear to be so easily parallelisable. We believe that these issues should be the focus of future research and development, understanding how they have operated in successful projects and designing and testing technological and organisational mechanisms to enhance future parallelisation.
Improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop; there are many other factors involved, for example the inertia, support, legislation, legacy systems and many more. However improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread. Lieberman and Fry (2001) foresee that ‘interacting with buggy software will be a cooperative problem solving activity of the end user, the system, and the developer.’ For some open source developers this is already true, expanding this situation to (potentially) include all of the end-users of the system would mark a significant change in software development practices. There are many techniques from HCI that can be easily and cheaply adopted by open source developers. Additionally there are several approaches that seem to provide a particularly good fit with a distributed networked community of users and developers. If open source projects can provide a simple framework for users to contribute non-technical information about software to the developers then they can leverage and promote the participatory ethos amongst their users. Raymond (1998) proposed that ‘given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.’ For seeing usability bugs, the traditional open source community may comprise the wrong kind of eyeballs. However it may be that by encouraging greater involvement of usability experts and end users it is the case that: given enough user experience reports all usability issues are shallow. By further engaging typical users into the development process OSS projects can create a networked development community that can do for usability what it has already done for functionality and reliability.
Evaluation:
Improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread of factors involved like inertia, support, legislation and legacy systems. I agree to what Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo and to this research paper concluded that open source community was just increasing its awareness of the usability issues. And also improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop.
The study reviews the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discusses how the characteristics of open-source development influence usability. It describes how existing human computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities of developers and users to address issues of usability.
Evaluation
When I was half way reading this paper, I was thinking that the development of open-source software overlooked the importance of good usability. But when I was done reading, it made me conclude that open source community was just increasing its awareness of the usability issues. Improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop. Improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread of factors involved.
Summary:
The open source community is increasing its awareness of usability issues. This paper has identified certain barriers to usability and explored how these are being and can be addressed. Several of the approaches directly mirror the problems identified. The automated evaluation where there is a shortage of human expertise and encourage various kinds of end user and usability expert participation to re-balance the development community for the average users. If traditional OSS development is about scratching a personal itch, usability is about being aware of and concerned about the itches of others. Deeper investigation of the issues outlined in this paper could take various forms. One of the great advantages of OSS development is that its process is to a large extent visible and recorded. A study of the archives of projects will enable a verification of the claims and hypotheses ventured here, as well as the uncovering of a richer understanding of the nature of current usability discussions and development work. Example questions include: “Do certain types of usability issues figure disproportionately in discussions and development effort, leaving others ignored or underdeveloped?”, “What distinguishes OSS projects that are especially innovative in their functionality and interface designs?” and “Can interface design consistency be preserved in the traditional modular OSS development environment?” The approaches outlined in the previous section need further investigation and indeed experimentation to see if they can be feasibly used in OSS projects, without disrupting the factors that make traditional functionality-centric OSS development so effective. These approaches are not necessarily restricted to OSS; several can be applied to proprietary software. Indeed the ideas derived from discount usability engineering and participatory design originated in developing better proprietary software. However, they may be even more appropriate for open source development in that they map well on to the strengths of a volunteer developer community with open discussion. Most HCI research has concentrated on pre-release activities that inform design and relatively little on post-release techniques (Hartson and Castillo, 1998; Smilowitz et al., 1994). It is noteworthy that participatory design is a field in its own right whereas participative usage is usually quickly passed over by HCI textbooks. Thus OSS development in this case need not merely play catch-up with the greater end user focus of the commercial world, but potentially can innovate in exploring how to involve end users in subsequent redesign. There have been several calls in the literature (Shneiderman 2002; Lieberman and Fry, 2001; Fischer, 1998) for users to become more involved in software development beyond standard user-centred design activities (such as usability testing, prototype evaluation and fieldwork observation). It is noticeable that these comments seem to ignore that this involvement is already happening in OSS projects. Raymond (1998) comments that “debugging is parallelizable”, we can add to this that usability reporting, analysis and testing is also parallelisable. However certain aspects of usability design do not appear to be so easily parallelisable. We believe that these issues should be the focus of future research and development, understanding how they have operated in successful projects and designing and testing technological and organisational mechanisms to enhance future parallelisation.
Improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop; there are many other factors involved, for example the inertia, support, legislation, legacy systems and many more. However improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread. Lieberman and Fry (2001) foresee that ‘interacting with buggy software will be a cooperative problem solving activity of the end user, the system, and the developer.’ For some open source developers this is already true, expanding this situation to (potentially) include all of the end-users of the system would mark a significant change in software development practices. There are many techniques from HCI that can be easily and cheaply adopted by open source developers. Additionally there are several approaches that seem to provide a particularly good fit with a distributed networked community of users and developers. If open source projects can provide a simple framework for users to contribute non-technical information about software to the developers then they can leverage and promote the participatory ethos amongst their users. Raymond (1998) proposed that ‘given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow.’ For seeing usability bugs, the traditional open source community may comprise the wrong kind of eyeballs. However it may be that by encouraging greater involvement of usability experts and end users it is the case that: given enough user experience reports all usability issues are shallow. By further engaging typical users into the development process OSS projects can create a networked development community that can do for usability what it has already done for functionality and reliability.
Evaluation:
Improved usability is a necessary condition for such a spread of factors involved like inertia, support, legislation and legacy systems. I agree to what Ms. Cherry Ann Montejo and to this research paper concluded that open source community was just increasing its awareness of the usability issues. And also improvements in the usability of open source software do not necessarily mean that such software will displace proprietary software from the desktop.
References
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/nicholstwidale1.pdf
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