SUPPORTING END USER REPORTING OF HCI ISSUES IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTS
Fabiana Pedreira Simões · 2013
Empowering end users to proactively contribute to OSS by reporting HCI issues not only represents a potential approach to solving HCI problems in OSS projects, but it also fits the Open Source values and ideology.By referring to the end users' personal experiences and feedback reports, designers in OSS communities may build their design rationale not only in an open and transparent manner, but also in such a way that end users relate to the values embedded in the community.This study aims to contribute to the existing literature by exploring (a) how issue reports fit and influence OSS designers' activities, (b) what the information needs of designers in OSS projects are, and(c) how to support users on the task of creating HCI issues reports that meet those needs.In order to collect data about questions (a) and (b), we conducted interviews with four designers contributing to OSS projects, and qualitatively evaluated a set of 547 bugs reported under HCI-related keywords.Using this data and based on Semiotic Engineering, we designed a form for users to report HCI issues.To investigate how well this form communicates the information needs of OSS designers and address question (c), we performed a study in which participants were invited to report HCI issues through the designed form.