Speaker: Michael Terry
Title: Usability in the Free/Open Source Software Community

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.

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.